Write about a scar. Could be a scar you have. A scar you have seen. A scar on Mother Earth. Could be an emotional scar.
Write about a scar from someone else’s point of view . . . someone who caused the accident, caused the scar, was bewitched or repelled by the scar.
Or write from the point of view of the scar.
Today’s guest blogger is Nancy Julien Kopp. Her blog, Writer Granny’s World features tips and treats about writing.
Her brilliant August 20, 2019 post (excerpt below) focused on how to use action with dialogue.
Fingers flying across keyboard, Marlene types, “On with the show, Nancy.”
I see writers putting action after dialogue. That’s backwards.
A. “Stop that!” Sally slapped his hand from her arm.
B. Sally slapped his hand from her arm. “Stop that!”
C. “Stop that!” Sally said. Sally slapped his hand from her arm.
Which is the best? The worst?
I think B is best.
And C is the worst.
In B, we see the action, then hear the words that go with it.
In A, would Sally say the words, then slap his hand away?
Note from Marlene: This would be a “delayed reaction.” Sally says “Stop that.” THEN slaps his hand away. In real life, of course, it would happen at the same time.
Although it’s hard to show action and dialogue that happens simultaneously, I think B does that.
Your mind sees the action in Example B, then absorbs the words.
And C? Adding the tag is unnecessary as the action tells you who is speaking.
Another example but this time adding feeling (or thought) prior to the action and dialogue. It’s called the FAD Principle. Feeling-Action-Dialogue
“Susan knew Mary would take the biggest piece of cake. She stepped between her friend and the table full of cake slices. ‘I’ll take this one.’”
“Susan knew Mary would take the biggest piece of cake. (Feeling/thought) She stepped between her friend and the table full of cake slices. (Action) ‘I’ll take this one.’” (Dialogue)
The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing features the FAD principle: Action should be shown first.
It seems more logical that Susan would step in front of the table before she speaks.
Even if you don’t have the Feeling part in the dialogue, just the Action and Dialogue, put the action first, then the spoken words.
Why? For clarity.
Develop the habit of using the action prior to the dialogue. We aren’t always going to have the Feeling included, but if you do, remember FAD.
Feeling-Action-Dialogue
Excerpt from Poetic Medicine, by John Fox, “Giving Yourself Permission to be Wild and Magnificent”
Earth offers us powerful images and metaphors with which to tell our stories. Rather than thinking of the earth’s resources as commodities like oil and wood . . . consider the more intangible qualities which nature offers us, such as beauty and spectacle, turmoil and order, mystery and predictability.
A sense of beauty – wild and terrible or lovely and breathtaking – can be healing.
Infusing your writing with earth imagery will help reveal your unique voice and imagination. The stories of earth – and our stories – are interwoven, constantly changing in the cyclic process of birth, growth and death. A language for expressing these deep changes in your life can be found by tuning to the language of the earth.
Poem-making
and the natural world give you permission to be wild and magnificent. Your poetic musings of connection with the earth can take you beyond conventional ways of looking at yourself.
We are often so busy conforming to traditional notions of success that we miss this joyful opportunity to cut loose and feel our lives – to express our highest potential and explore our true legacy.
Prompt: Using inspiration from the natural world present an outrageous, yet honest, picture of yourself . . . or paint a word picture about anything you want, perhaps something that happened over the weekend, or during this past week.
I recently spoke at a meeting of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast, a branch of the California Writers Club, on the subject of blogging.
I recommend the blogs and books mentioned below. And of course there are many other blogs, books, and information about blogging on the world wide web.
If you don’t have a blog, but think you should, something to think about is why?
Why should you have an author blog?
“Blogging is simply a medium that allows you to connect with people who love the same books, hobbies and activities you do.” — Gabriela Pereira, May/June 2018, Writer’s Digest magazine
Find Your Target Audience: Read the reviews of books in your genre on Amazon or Goodreads. Use words from the reviews for your headlines and tags in your posts.
Stories about you: Your interests, hobbies, pets, hometown. Interviews.
One way to build your platform is to be a guest blogger. I welcome your essays about encouraging writers and writing tips on The Write Spot Blog. Go to “Guest Bloggers” to see what others have done (800-1200 words).
Book reviews are also welcome on The Write Spot Blog.
Marlene Cullen, The Write Spot Blog
Nancy Julian Kopp, Writers Granny’s World
Jane Friedman, Blog for Writers
How To Blog a Book, Nina Amir
The Author Blog, Anne R. Allen
The Write Spot to Jumpstart Your Writing: Discoveries
The Write Spot to Jumpstart Your Writing: Connections
The Write Spot: Reflections
The Write Spot: Memories
Should you host an author’s blog to build your platform? You don’t have to, but it’s a good idea . . . as long as you stay focused on your “main” writing . . . your fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoir. And if you love posting on your blog . . . do it! Just write!
When you read the next ditty, read “d-o-e-s” as in female deer.
Mairzy Doats
Mares eat oats and does eat oats
and little lambs eat ivy
a kid will eat ivy, too
wouldn’t you?
Say it fast and it becomes:
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?
Link to what this sounds like.
I think of this rhyme when I think of pacing – paying attention to the cadence and rhythm of writing.
How and when to increase the pace when writing.
Paraphrased from Make A Scene by Jordan Rosenfeld:
By pacing your scenes well and choosing the proper length for each scene, you can control the kinds of emotional effects your scenes have, leaving the reader with the feeling of having taken a satisfying journey.
Pace should match the emotional content of your scene. First scenes should get going with an emotional bang—start big or dramatic, ratchet up the suspense or lay in the fear, since you’re capturing the reader here.
Your first scene is like a cold pool—the reader needs to dive in and get moving fast, or he’ll be too cold to stay in the water for very long. In other scene types, you’ll have more leeway with pacing. In the first scene, however, a quick pace—with more action and less reflection or exposition—will be a better sell.
Dramatic scenes – Start slow, speed up pace to match emotional intensity, slow down for reflection.
Speed up pace: Strip away exposition, use dialogue, quick action, and hot emotional content to build intensity.
When and how to slow the pace
After a lot of action or intense dialogue give the reader time to digest what happened.
Use description, narration, details and interior monologues to slow the pace.
When a character is contemplative, time slows down.
During these contemplative scenes you can weave in details. Be specific and descriptive. Give your character something to observe or something to do, more than hair twirling.
Your turn: Do a freewrite about pacing.
Here’s mine, thinking about Mairzy Doats. This was a quickly written spontaneous type of writing, just for fun.
Go too fast and we get frantic and hear garble versus calm, steady breaths and an even, gentle flow.
Calm is water caressing rocks, dark green moss going with the flow.
No rough and tumble white water rapids. No gurgling over brooks, no water cascading over boulders.
Rather, when we slow our writing, we achieve a calm, quiet, graceful feeling.
Pace yourself. Eat watermelon slowly. Savor the juices.
Pace yourself.
Write fast let you lose that thought.
To slow down, think about the poppy scene in Wizard of Oz. Slower, slower, snail’s pace slow.
Meditate. Ommmmmmm.
To pick up the pace, think caffeine and the energy of a toddler/child, always on the go. Child knows no pacing. Always running, talking, doing.
Challenge self: No such thing as Writer’s Block. Just keep writing.
More on pacing: Find the right pace by Adair Lara: Prompt #70
If your life was surrounded by a frame, what would the edges look like?
Sharp, soft, curvy, plain, straight?
Brightly colored, small, large?
Dull, deep, shallow?
Stand out?
Plain, simple, fancy?
Blend in?
Fierce?
Protective?
Describe what the edges of your life’s frame would look like.
Does your frame help you or hinder you?
What kind of edge does your life hold?
Write about a frame that borders your life.
Your fictional characters should be as different from one another as the real people in your life. One way to show differences is in their voices.
Years ago, returning home from Aqua Zumba, I drove past Hermann Sons Hall and remembered the German woman who managed the building as if it were her immaculate residence. On our early morning walks, my husband and I watched as she polished door knobs, washed windows, and replaced gravel in the driveway. Her mission was to keep “her” building spotless. You didn’t want to cross her.
How does a writer establish “voice” for characters?
If your character is a stoic German woman who manages a building as if it were her pristine cottage, picture what she looks like. Short hair, stern features, sensible shoes, tailored clothing. Then you can imagine what she sounds like: sharp, clipped sentences, uses precise words sparingly.
Contrast that with a Mother Goose type: round in looks, ample lap for children to sit on, laugh lines forming parenthesis around her mouth, her eyes crinkle with merriment. She might talk softly or slow. You can hear the smile in her sugary voice.
Write a scene showing two characters’ personalities using dialogue.
For more on writing about character: Three-dimensional characters . . . Prompt #444 on The Write Spot Blog.
You have probably heard about the importance of knowing your fictional characters so well that you know what he/she had for breakfast. Readers don’t need to know this, but the writer does.
You don’t need to include everything you know about your characters in your story, but as the writer/creator, you need to know a huge amount of information about the people (and animals) who populate your story.
The challenge is to create memorable characters rather than one-dimensional characters. Your fictional characters are like actors in a scene.
Some fictional characters seem shallow while others seem richer. The difference could be that the writer knows the characters/actors so well, that the dialogue and the details fit the character.
Your fictional actor may want to step out of character and exhibit new behavior. This is fine, as long as it’s credible. Your job as writer is to drop convincing clues so when the character does an about face, the reader believes it. You can still have twists and turns that are surprising for the reader, but everything needs to be consistent with what the character would or could do.
Examples:
Is your character a loving husband who shows his affection with gentle actions towards his wife? If yes, then it would be out character for him to leave her stranded at a party. There would need to be a reason for his out-of-character behavior. Maybe he found out she isn’t who he thought she was.
If your character shuffles in worn-out bedroom slippers, listens to the radio from 4:30 pm to 6 pm in her favorite armchair while knitting, then goes to bed at 7:30 pm, it would be strange for her to dress up in Spanx and a tight red dress to go bar hopping. She could do this, but you would have to set up the scene so it’s believable.
If you portray your characters as authentic, then when your characters drive off a cliff in a convertible, the reader believes they would really do this. Yes, I’m thinking about Thelma and Louise.
Want to practice?
Write three scenes.
Show your character in an ordinary scene . . . something they usually do, their routine, their habits.
Write a scene with details about what might make that character go over the edge, a “last-straw” type of thing, a friend or a relative did something one too many times. Or the character receives news that spins his/her life in a new direction.
Write the final scene showing the character exhibiting new behavior.
Stories should be aimed not at our heads but at our hearts.
“And this is where things get interesting, because description actually allows access to our hearts in a neurophysical way.”
I have wondered why reading something with sensory detail leaves more of an impression than writing that doesn’t have sensory detail.
According to studies, “when we read about an odor, it engages the exact same part of the brain as actually smelling it, and those parts of the brain reside in the lower region, alongside our emotional centers. . . When you write using smells, or images, or sensations, you’re actually gaining access to the emotional area of the brain, and this is why stories can take such precise aim at the heart.
Words like lavender, cinnamon, and soap, for example, elicit a response not only from the language processing areas of our brain, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.”
Excerpted from “The Heart and the Eye: How Description Can Access Emotion,” by J. T. Bushnell, Jan/Feb 2013. Poets & Writers Magazine
J. T. Bushnell applies neurophysics to effective writing, shedding light on how strong description gains access to the emotional area of the brain.
Mid-American Review publishes works of fine literary art from a diverse body of artists.
“We are on the lookout for work that has the power to move and astonish us while displaying the highest level of craft.
We dedicate ourselves to encouraging, nurturing, teaching, and learning from the writers we meet through careful consideration of their work and meaningful dialogue.
The writers in each issue shall include both well-established poets and authors and brand new voices.
Because the acts of writing and reading force people to slow down and examine the world and their part in it, MAR is in a position to foster peace and understanding and to make a positive difference, and we fully embrace the challenge of making the world a better place through literature. We are dedicated to finding new audiences for contemporary writing and to building the audience for our journal, while also providing an outlet for professional development and personal growth among staff members.