March 4, 2013
When Writing, Shout it Out
Are you surprised to hear your writing should be strong and confident, with the verbal tone of one who can’t fail? You shouldn’t be. This is fiction. We like our heroes flawed but super, our dialogue crisp and pointed, and our protagonists like bulls in life’s china shop–charging forward though they can’t possibly succeed.
Your story needs to reflect those biases. Character decisions must be opinionated and firm. Action moves forward at a hundred miles an hour no matter the literary speed limit. Antagonists are meaner than a crazed parakeet in a cage. Otherwise, readers find the story too close to real life, and who needs to read about that?
It’s easier than it sounds to affect this bias. Step One: Write as you normally would. Let the words flow from subconscious to paper. Don’t edit. Don’t stop. Just write. Step Two: When you’ve finished the first draft, excise wishy washy. Remove mitigating words–all of them. These include:
about
actually
almost
approximately
barely
basically
close to
finally
like
kind of
nearly
practically
seemed to
slightly
somehow
sort of
suddenly
tried
Do a Word search of your entire story–or Ctrl+F. Every time you find one of these action-killers, delete it.
Step Three: Re-read the mss. Wow! Your pacing now matches what’s been sprinting through your head.
I understand what you’re going through. You and me–we’re similar. We live in a community, so must get along with hundreds of disparate personalities. We do that by watering down our opinions, listening with a smile to the (flawed) thoughts of others, avoiding prejudice and its ugly twin bias as though they were unwanted relatives. The truth: Readers want to love your protagonist and hate the ground your antagonist’s shadow falls on. Readers want to know if they can travel four hundred pages with these people. To do that requires an understanding of motivations, actions, what drives the plot in your story, none of which can be accomplished if you couch every thought and movement in ‘kind of’ and ‘seemed to’. Check those attitudes at the door to your office. Write like you’re opinionated, sure of yourself, and that everyone wants to know exactly what you think.
Well, not politics. It’s a brave writer who wraps politics into their storyline. Do that at your peril.
Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com and TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blog,Technology in Education featured blogger, IMS tech expert, and a bi-weekly contributor to Today’s Author. In her free time, she is the editor of a K-8 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum, and creator of technology training books for how to integrate technology in education. Currently, she’s editing a thriller that should be out to publishers next summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.
