The party continues on the summer supergrid!
It looks like everyone’s finding a home on the supergrid these days, from the folks fine-tuning the mix of lemons in their gargleblasters to the gangsters roaming through from the speakeasy (tommy guns in hand, of course), to the humor and heartbreak of the traditional storytellers who just want to blog, for pete’s sake, and aren’t entirely sure how the gangsters got into their kitchen.
Don’t let the Story Mafia scare you! Come on in, pull up a chair and a violin case. They’re big softies once you get to know them. Start out in the coffeehouse if you like, grab an iced caffeinated beverage and get to know your fellow yeah writers a little better. Here’s the door, come on in.
If you’re done with your coffee and ready for an adult beverage, the bronze lounge is all about peer-to-peer critique. Introduce yourself to a smaller yeah write audience than usual and upload a piece you’d like to offer for some constructive criticism. Try to stick close to the regular word limits of 600 for nonfiction and 750 for fiction, but since you’re bringing a draft in the door with you, that’s not a hard and fast rule until you post that piece to the grid. Don’t forget to critique a few pieces yourself! It’s all about getting involved. Even if you don’t feel qualified to give detailed feedback on a piece, just letting the author know your honest impressions can go a long way. Register here for free, then dive in.
If you are looking for something even more intimate, you can get some personal attention from our editors in the silver and gold lounges here.
All summer, all our grids come together into one beautifully cramped place. So if you’re looking for the gargleblaster, the challenge grid, and/or the speakeasy, the supergrid is where you want to be. Even though all genres are welcome on the supergrid, we still want to see your best work so we gave you a special summer birthday present: The prompt is available every week two whole days before the grid opens, and the grid itself stays open an extra day. This means you have the time to bring your work to the lounges or ask questions in the coffeehouse before you throw yourself on the mercy of the grid. I know you just want to get your post done so you can go back to playing in the sprinklers, but let’s play summer school instead and take advantage of all the opportunities to get feedback and revise your work before it goes on the grid.
If you have a post that didn’t do as well as you were expecting it to, you can even bring it to the lounges next week for feedback and resubmit the revised version later (with a link to the original so we can see your improvement)!
Verbs make me tense!
Many New York gangsters in the early 20th Century came from impoverished backgrounds, but this will not have been the case for the legendary Al Capone. Rather than being a poor immigrant from Italy who would have turned to crime to make a living, Capone is coming from a respectable, professional family. His father, Gabriele, can have been one of thousands of Italians who arrive in New York in 1894. He will be thirty years old, educated and from Naples, where he earns a living as a barber. His wife is pregnant and brought up two sons. The family will move to a poor Brooklyn tenement where Alphonse Capone was born on January 17, 1899.
Did that make you cringe just a little? I hope so. Even though all the words are spelled correctly and every sentence has a subject, object and verb, the verb tenses are so inconsistent that it’s almost impossible to keep reading without feeling like you’re being dropped through a time warp. Let’s take a minute to discuss the safe operation of your wayback machine.
Tenses: what are they and why do we need them?
Verb tenses provide the when in the “who, what, when, why, how” of your story. They tell your reader if the action is taking place in the present, took place in the past, will take place in the future, or even will have taken place by the time the reader reads although it hasn’t happened yet while the writer writes.
At the simplest level, you can break all verbs into three tenses: past, present and future. Verb tense gives you the absolute location in time of the action. Past: Gaius Julius Caesar died. Present: I am reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Future: I will act in a play next summer.
When you write, your story generally takes place in one location in time, so all your verbs need to be in the same tense to avoid sending the reader through a time warp. If you are moving through time, keep that in mind and make sure each part of the story is consistent. For example, if you are describing your child crying this morning because she does not want to take a road trip in your tiny camper, and then you flash back to the disastrous trip you took last summer, the description of your interaction with your daughter should use the present tense, but the description of the road trip should use the past tense. Your plans for this summer? Those are future tense.
Aspects: oh my god is that still happening?
While tenses place the action (and your story) in absolute time, aspects let you know whether the action is ongoing or completed. The four aspects are simple, perfect, progressive, and perfect progressive. That seems like a lot to memorize, but really all you have to know is, is the action done, or is it ongoing?
If Al Capone is already dead, use the simple or perfect aspects: I shot Al Capone; Al Capone was shot. “Perfect” as a description for a verb just means “complete.” (I wish complete and perfect meant the same thing every time I write a story, don’t you?)
If the action is ongoing, use the progressive aspect: When Al came out of that courtroom, I was shooting every bullet I had at him.
(Note for the confused: all of the examples in this section are in the past tense. Only the aspect has been changed in each example.)
Wait. There’s more?
In addition to tense and aspect, verbs can also have moods, like the conditional or subjunctive. Ironically, while “verb modality” sounds like the hardest thing to understand, writers tend to screw up the mood of a verb much less often than they make mistakes in the tense or aspect. If you’re really into English grammar and construction, feel free to jump over to the wikipedia article and familiarize yourself with them. Otherwise, it’s probably enough to know that the conditional mood means I would have shot Al Capone if my gun hadn’t jammed, and the subjunctive means that it was imperative that he be shot.
OK, you can relax now.
Whether you’re reading through the grid, giving a critique in the bronze lounge, or putting the finishing touches on your own post before submitting, keep verbs in mind. Don’t drop your readers through a time warp… unless you’re doing it on purpose.
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