Today’s Writing Tip

Marcha's Two-Cents Worth

I don’t know about you, but my first drafts tend to be unbalanced. This, of course, depends on your natural style. There may have too much or too little of certain elements. My first drafts tend to be heavy on action and dialog. I’ve often envied screenwriters, who can do just that and let producers and directors worry about the rest.

However, for your story to be the best it can be, it needs to incorporate more. Don’t interrupt the creative flow by worrying about it during your first draft. For your second draft, however, one way to assess what you have is by checking how your IDEAS are presented.

As you’ve probably guessed, that’s an acronym for: Imagery; Dialog; Emotion; Action; Suspense.

Read each scene and check to make sure it has some of each. Imagery could have been established earlier, which is fine. Not every scene will have…

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Living in a Peach #IWSG

 

Today I’m writing for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group’s blog hop. The first Wednesday of each month, we write in inspiration to a question posed by the group’s administrators. We don’t need to write in response to the question posed, but I like to use their query as the springboard for the monthly post.

This month the OPTIONAL IWSG Day Question is: What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?

Living in a Peach

At first I was stumped by this question. I couldn’t think of any early experience where I learned that language had power. But then a book leaped to mind, one I’d read in the third grade. James and the Giant Peach. Even though I’ve read voraciously since I learned about how the letters made words, which made a story, in third grade I discovered James and the Giant Peach, Charlotte’s Web, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Fifty years later I still recall the magic of these three books. I was carried to worlds most magnificent. I found out that books can transport us – and that’s a pretty strong argument for language having power.