Videos on Writing Craft

I wasn't sure what he was talking about with three verbs per sentence, so I opened Season of the Witch and checked about the first 15 paragraphs. I have lots of sentences with three, and a few with four verbs. Just a few examples:

• Rachel leaned over the front seat to see, caught a flash of white tail and brown fur frantically zig-zagging in front of them.

• Rachel jerked free of mom’s grip, spun and searched along the length of the ditch behind them.

• His hand ran toward Rachel, leaped off the seat, and tickled her neck.

• Rachel snuggled into the back seat and pulled her blanket over her legs, lay her head against the seat-back, and sat staring dreamily upwards with a contented smile.

Not sure if Sat and Staring both count as verbs or if one is an adverb in that sentence. If they both count, there's 5. I suspect Staring is just a modifier for Sat though.

And now I see how you do it. I used a lot of Ands and commas to connect up short little phrases into a sentence. Each one is like several little mini-sentences.

And all of that with nary an em-dash! Once I start in with those I'm probably welding two such compound sentences together. Let me read ahead a bit.

• The giant tree-people are nodding and talking among themselves, telling each other stories in a language humans can’t hear. (5—actually probably 4)

• At any moment one of the strange forms might tear itself loose and go striding gigantically across the landscape, or pick up their car and shake it. (4)

• Maybe pull her mom out through the window and then pass her from one to another far out into the vast wilderness where there are no people, only nodding trees and animals, and she can’t find her way back home. (3 or 4—not sure if Are counts as a verb here)

• And then there would just be her and Dad, and they would be happy, and he would tell her stories and they could eat home-cooked food all the time and live out here in the countryside with the friendly tree people. (5)

• Rachel ignores her, just stares out the window in her trance and thinks maybe that would be better. (3)

But still no em-dashes. And that was a recent addition, still very rough around the edges. Let me try again.

Oh what the hell?! I just scanned through the whole thing and only found I think three em-dashes. Is this even my writing!!?? I use them all over on the board and my blog, and there's almost none in my story? And those sentences (with the em-dashes) each only had two or three verbs in them. Weird.

Transformative stories
He talked about them in the second video, maybe in both. That's the only thing I'm interested in writing now. It's what both Beastseekers and Season are at the core, about self-transformation (or just transformation in the case of Rachel). Also known as transcendence. I've already been through it myself, now I'm processing the experiences, and writing about it is a big part of that.