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Week Four: avoiding the traps of amateur writing

This week’s prompts are at the very end of this post. Please welcome back guest editor Deb Williams who tweets as @mannahattamamma and blogs at MannaHatta Mamma. If you have any questions or need any clarification on today’s topic or prompts, please feel free to begin a discussion in comments.

If you’re here just to hang out, click here for the yeah write #67 hangout grid.

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Use your verbs

When beginning or amateur writers try to get specific, they tend to muffle their sentences in adjectives, adverbs, or flowery imagery, and sorely neglect the engine of the sentence: the verb.

Here’s a question: what does “is” look like?

I’ll wait while you consider.

Yawn.

Not much comes to mind, right?

Now try these: slurp, impale, slouch, cackle, slur, percolate, lick.

See? Much more interesting.

Spanx your prose, people. Nobody wants to see your sag.

Find yourself a strong action verb, and it’s like Spanx for your prose: your sentence loses the sag in the middle; it gets toned, dynamic, vivid. Get yourself a good verb and whammo—your sentences now have upper-arm definition and a six-pack.

Sometimes I ask my students to look at their writing and circle every form of the verb “to be” on their paper:  all the “is/was/were + verb” constructions, all the “is/was/were.” We use these structures so often that they’ve become habits of mind—we don’t even notice that they’re there. Sometimes it is unavoidable to use an “is,” but almost as often, you can wrestle your sentence into a more dynamic form.

Using a one-word action verb forces you to be specific, and we need that specificity to help readers connect with our writing.  It’s a paradox: we connect through our shared understanding of universal emotions—love, lust, anger, desire, compassion, grief—but we must convey that shared understanding in specific, concrete details. Show us palms sweating, veins throbbing, hearts pounding. In the specifics of the verb, we see the universal.  By all means, tackle Big Subjects in your blog, but keep in mind that Big Subjects hit home when you capture them with precise details: remember the first commandment of narrative and show, don’t tell.

Lose the “is” and you’ll look fab.

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yeah write #67 badges

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• Click in the upper right corner of this page on the plus symbol and the hidden widget containing the button badge codes will drop
• Copy the code of your favorite badge, then paste that code into the HTML view of the post you’re planning to submit to the grid
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all your story are belong to you

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• Read the summer FAQ page for other details: the grid is being moderated and if you’re missing an element outlined in the summer FAQ, your post will not be published on the grid
• Let the prompt lead you, but do not include the prompt in any way in your post, not at the beginning as an intro, not at the end as a footnote. If you reference the prompt in your post, your post will not be published on the grid
• Remember: no more than 500 words. If your post exceeds 500 words, yup, you guessed it—no publish for you
• If the prompt takes you from thunderstorms to watching TV at your grandma’s house to how much you love Pat Sajak to the oldest person you’ve ever kissed, we want that story the furthest away in your imagination from the original prompt. Let your imagination loose
• Keep your writing style! Do you tell stories with humor? Prose? Verse? Photos? Illustrations? Keep doing that. We’ll read Shakespearean drama on our own time
• Cut away at everything unnecessary to your story
• Don’t forget to badge your post
• The grid is open for submissions and will close to new ones Wednesday at 9 pm, then voting will open for the first time in weeks!

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[divider_header_h3] This week’s prompts [courtesy of Tom Slatin] [/divider_header_h3]

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• What is the most annoying sound you have ever heard?
• What is your biggest insecurity?
• Does Never Never Land really exist?

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Yeah write #67 summer writer’s series grid is open…