Thanks! Is it possible to put up a sample here for feedback so you can see exactly what my problem is, or anywhere else on this website.
Obviously this has been said many times, but practice is going to need to be your constant companion. So is observation. Don't just practice writing practice seeing, too. I recently learned that people hated going on walks with Tolkien because he would frequently stop and stare at a tree, bush, rock, etc for an unusually long time. Art - in all forms - is seeing, not showing
Yes, it's called the Workshop, but it has requirements. Read about them here: https://www.writingforums.org/faq/writing-workshop.16/category
You could put something in the Workshop--and then maybe put a link to that here, so that people reading this thread know where it is. The workshop requirements: https://www.writingforums.org/faq/writing-workshop.16/category It looks like you have the number of posts (barely?) and number of days; you'll still need to do the two constructive reviews per piece you post.
I agree with what @ChickenFreak said: try to analyze at the paragraph or phrase level. I think you'll like the thread at https://www.writingforums.org/threads/share-your-first-three-sentences.145670/. There, you can post your first three sentences and get feedback. It's only three sentences, so it's not like posting in the Workshop, but I still think you'll get some great tips from there. Happy writing!
Thanks! One of my problems is writing something like: "His leg felt painful." Whereas people are saying to write: "The muscle throbbed in red, searing waves of never-ending agony." I kind of write the verb, whereas people write the emotion. How do i go about addressing this, how do i translate one into the other. Is there a website that does this. I have the emotions thesaurus which looks helpful from my amateurish point of view, what do you think of the advice contained within. I am trying to upload it as epub but failed, tried again as ms word but failed as the website does not support the file extention Many thanks
You don't need to get as flowery as all that, and I wouldn't unless the pain was really important. But "felt painful" could be anything from a little ache to unbearable agony. So alternatives might be: His leg ached/stung/hurt/throbbed/twinged/spasmed. His leg was sore/stiff. His leg screamed/screamed in agony. Fire coursed through his calf. And so on. Which to use depends on how much his leg hurt, whether it's ongoing pain or happening right at that moment, and how big a deal you want to make of it. Try a lot of ways to say it, see what works for you and the scene.
So I've only skimmed through most of the posts, so forgive me if this point has already been made, but also don't miss the forest for the trees. Every sentence is important, true, but make sure the sentences in the paragraph flow together. Try not to get too caught up in how you are writing it, and think about how you want the reader to read it. You want the sentences to flow through the reader's mind easily and clearly. Don't make them stop too many times. This might not be a popular opinion, Clive Barker is a famous and very successful writer that I cannot stand to read! His imagery is excellent, but I've always found his writing very choppy. His sentences just don't flow well in my head. On the other hand, you have writers like Ray Bradbury whose paragraphs flow through your head like a mountain stream, and it's lovely, even if you don't know what exactly he's talking about.
This is totally me in a nutshell! I can't stop polishing either. I feel like there is always something I can write in a better way or expand on.
1. Read at leas a book a week. Your voice will get better. 2. Kill your darlings. 3. Take away everything that is unnecessary. 4. Read about writing, style, everything. 5. Find many kind of stimulus to your life. 6. Be brief. Say a lot with few words. 7. Train yourself all the time. (How could you make your opening more interesting and easier to read? Rewrite and/or edit it till it's flirting with readers.) 8. Read your texts aloud. 9. Think about thinking. (Text is thoughts.) 10. Seek for physical reactions among your readers. 11. Write what you know emotionally. 12. Make things layered. Weave those layers together.
Careful making comparisons during the draft stage. The draft stage allows you to make all the mistakes and figure out what you want to say first versus how you want to say it. Second and third drafts allow you to tinker and shape and sharpen your text so that it sounds more like the pros. I don't have a lot of references to point you to. I found the easiest way to improve is to study writers you admire and sort of want to emulate and trial and error. Lots of practice. Because there's no point in deciding to be a flowery prose writer and then take a lot of advice that goes against that or vice versa. Part of a good paragraph is getting you info in order and making it relevant as a whole. Don't shoehorn in items give them they're own mini paragraphs or lines. Use words that elevate your meaning choosing nouns and verbs that not only carry your message but harmonize so that your sentences have a sense of rhythm. Break up the sentence structure so that all sentences don't sound the same. Pick words that complete what you want to say so that you don't have to use a lot more words to explain what your really mean. It's ten times easier to say - ran - then went quickly. Rushed than - moved fast. Also words can do double duty when you chose them carefully. Homemade tacos gives you a more precise image than Carol made dinner. And giving more precise images allows you to better set up your scene resulting in more fluid sentences. Once you imagine Carol making tacos - you can add the scent of spicy beef, her nicking her fingers on the cheese shredder, her child, snatching a handful of chopped tomato and leaving a dripping trail of seeds as he heads upstairs to do homework. Precise details allows your scene to come to life.
Thanks for the replies, much appreciated. Quick question. What do you think of this: https://jerryjenkins.com/powerful-verbs/ Verbs have been mentioned earlier, so I flicked through best selling books like harry potter, and this is totally ignored. JK uses ' was ' and ' that ' whenever she feels like. What do you think? Thanks.
Think text as a flow of thoughts. If you want to make it interesting & accessible to readers, you must make it easy & safe to ride with. But it must be interesting and exiting at the same time. There are masters who can take their readers through white waters. If you don't sell by millions, you are not one of those. And that is not the place to start your learning. Everything in Rowling's books is about tension & flow. She can handle it. She can do things that cut reader's flow if I try it. Lesser writers like us... We try to learn lesser tricks and skills. When we master them, we study harder and harder and harder tricks and skills. If you want to learn how to do magic with your words like Rowling does, you should get yourself a bunch of alpha readers and listen to them carefully. (I'll go and open a thread about this in General Writing. (Or was it Colonel Writing or Admiral Writing or Major Writing or...) Edit(h Piaf): https://www.writingforums.org/threads/alpha-readers.162185/
I don't think much of that article for two a multitude of reasons. One, I don't think it's a good idea to try to judge sentences in isolation. Trying to make every sentence stand out or be "powerful" doesn't make writing easier or more interesting to read, it just makes things feel overwrought. Sentences need to work as parts of paragraphs, not as individual tools. Two, even in isolation, and even with him likely cherry-picking examples he thinks best prove his point, I don't see improvement in most of the sentences he "corrects". Changing "he walked" to "he strode" only improves the sentence if the character actually IS striding. Sometimes people just walk. They don't stride, they don't stroll, they don't meander--they walk, and the important part of the sentence/paragraph/scene isn't the exact mode of perambulation, it's other stuff that's going on. There's nothing wrong with his "improved" sentences, but there was nothing wrong with the unimproved ones, either, not to my eye. And these are the STRONGEST examples he can come up with. Three, he wants to eliminate an entire verb tense (past continuous/past progressive). He offers no rationale for this, I assume because he doesn't have anything reasonable to say in defense of this absurd suggestion. "He walked" is certainly shorter than "he was walking", but it's a completely different tense and doesn't convey the same meaning. Different verb tenses are useful; we should use them. Three point five... actually, while his examples are all past continuous, I think he'd be eliminating present and future continuous as well, with this drive to eliminate "verbs with -ing suffixes". I mean, how would he "fix" "I am editing". "I edit"? Does he really think this conveys the same meaning? Four, the list of "strong" verbs he offers seems completely random and he offers no explanation of why these verbs are stronger than others. Why does he correct a sentence to "strode" earlier in the piece, when "strode" is not, apparently, one of the "strong" verbs he recommends? Why is "shepherd" somehow stronger than "herd"? Why is "gush" stronger than "spurt" or "spray"? Why is "explode" recommended, but "implode" not? The list is completely nonsensical. Five, even when trying to show an example of a paragraph "improved" by his technique, he doesn't follow his own advice. In the paragraph in which he claims to have eliminated "state of being" verbs, he leaves in "am", "you'll" (a contraction, of course, of "you will"), and "can". He doesn't follow his own advice, even when claiming to, and that's GOOD, because his advice is silly. There may be more objections, but I'm bored of sorting through it all.
I think that it's mostly bad advice. Advice that recommends avoiding specific words is almost always bad advice. The attack on the continuous tense makes no sense at all. The "strong words list" looks like something created for the purpose of clickbait. Actually, the whole page looks like something created for the purpose of clickbait. I would ignore this man's advice entirely. (And I realize that @BayView said all this and said it better than I did, but I think the page is so very bad that I couldn't help posting.)
I fell into the Jerry Jenkins trap and said okay lets see how many 'that' I could get rid of, and I had to put most of them back. I did make changes on 'up' and 'down,' but that would probably happen on any individual word you challenged. Maybe that will be my new editing plan is to challenge every word, "Hey you there. What are you doing in my story?" "Nothing." "Then get the hell out of here and make room for an interesting word."
Thanks! What do you think it is that JK does that others do not. She has a degree but is that it. Is there a style or a way she places her words.
The question of how JK Rowling gets away with 'was' or 'that' isn't a puzzle, any more than the question of how a chef gets away with using salt, lemon, and garlic is a puzzle. Basic tools are basic tools, used by essentially all practitioners of an art. The puzzle is how anyone, like Mr. Jenkins, gets away with claiming that those basic tools should be avoided. Can anyone find a published book that actually avoids those words? I just went through my Kindle, and I can't.
She has a charming, whimsical style and a plot and characters that work well with the charm and whimsy. She writes well at the paragraph/chapter/book level. She's created a world that a lot of people want to spend time in. (And she created a world that was easy to translate into a movie series, and that certainly helped her sales as well). She's the same writer with the same skills in her non-Potter works, and while they've done fine, they haven't taken off like Potter. Her writing is of the same quality in the non-Potter books, I must assume, so... don't look at her writing, not at the "word choice" level. Look at her creativity, and the characters/setting/plot she developed in the Potter series. That's what made her a phenomenon. And if you look at most other writers who've reached the stratosphere, you'll find a similar pattern. Their writing, at the word/sentence level, tends to be fine, but what really sets them apart is the character/plot/setting/filmability, and/or the luck of hitting the zeitgeist in just the right spot at just the right time.
