watch your tone
How would you describe the rain in the picture?
Well, it all depends on what that woman is doing, doesn’t it?
If she’s meeting up with her married lover, Jean-Jacques, the raindrops slipping between her collar and her neck may be reminding her of their last encounter. If she’s a hitchhiker about to be picked up by a serial killer named The Axe Master, raindrops may be beating against her coat like an SOS. In either case, they wouldn’t be warm and reassuring drops because she’s wearing a thick skirt and a coat, and they wouldn’t be leaping or pirouetting because nothing about this picture says “energy” or “happy.”
That’s tone, folks. It’s pretty integral to keeping your reader in the right state of mind for your story. Mix some tone into dialogue and you’ll notice the conversations between your characters get livelier.
Speaking of lively, remember to read the submission guidelines before you press post or hit send, especially if you are new around here (Welcome!). Have a favorite yeah writer or two? Why not ask them to be your writing partner? Everyone needs another set of eyes to point out the typos, word repetitions, content errors, and ungainly phraseologies in our posts.
Prompt up!
Prompt up is our optional weekly writing prompt for the fiction|poetry challenge! Here’s how it works: we choose a sentence prompt from last week’s winning nonfiction post. You use the prompt in your poem or story somehow. Feel free to use it as your first sentence, last sentence, change it completely, or float down it to other territories.
This week’s Prompt Up taken from Nina’s essay is: “A television hummed in the small family room, broadcasting news that no one was really listening to.”
More prompts for you
Give our echo poem a try, or read this month’s nonfiction know-how on how to decide to post something that might hurt others’ feelings. Look for a new poem form and nonfiction know-how this Thursday.
Stay in the know on all our prompts and promotions by signing up for our mailer! We promise not to spam you. Or stop by the coffeehouse and meet some of the people behind the words!
Yeah write #294 fiction|poetry writing challenge is open for submissions!
Basic yeah write guidelines: 750 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; fiction or poetry only.
How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:
- In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the challenge grid badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry
- Follow the InLinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid
- Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message
- Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge
- Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog
Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.
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