The "So-What" Factor

Assignment: When you finish reading a scene, ask yourself, "So what? Is this scene necessary?" Read the scenes before and after the one in question and ask yourself if it really matters. Does whatever happens deserve its own scene? Could the information be placed in one of the neighboring scenes?

From Novelist's Essential Guide to Crafting Scenes by Raymond Obstfeld

Copying to improve style

This is an exercise I have come across in several different books. The writer is asked to copy a selected segment — a few paragraphs, a scene, or a chapter — from a favorite author's novel, preferably a best seller. By copying, I mean to handwrite out these selections. Of course, this is not for using in the writer's own manuscript, but for study.

How does copying text from a favorite novel help the writer? In his book You Can Write a Novel, James V. Smith, Jr. says this teaches several lessons. First, it helps the writer to master simple mechanics such as punctuation. Secondly, it helps the writer learn publishing conventions of the genre from which the writer is using. For example, it gives the writer a perspective on chapter length and scene to scene transitions. Next, it helps the writer create images with either much detail or a few specific word pictures. Also, it helps the writer study dialogue. Lastly, it helps the writer build scenes by building conflict, suspense and character motivation.

The idea behind copying writing is to develop prose style. The writer might benefit by performing this exercise a few times before writing a draft of a short story or novel. It can also be repeated on those occasions when writer's block seems to be tightening the writer's hand and throat. "As a method of studying writing," says Smith, "I have found none better. It works. It will teach more about professional, salable writing than any three college courses or any five writing handbooks."

Assignment: The following exercise is from Finding Your Voice by Les Edgerton. "Choose a book, a short story or an article from your favorite writer, one whose work is at least fifty years old. Select a favorite passage and type it out. Try to analyze how the sentences work. Compare it with a piece of your own that uses similar material, paying particular attention to how you both handle the elements listed below.

1. Scenery descriptions (active or passive?)
2. Dialogue
3. Flashbacks or backstory
4. Dialogue tags or attibutions
5. Use of adverbs and adjectives
6. Use of punctuation and grammar
7. Elaborate transitions
8. Andy idiosyncrasy that seems archaic or 'odd' to you"
   

That emotional connection

In The Writer's Digest Writing Clinic, the fiction writer is encouraged to make sure he or she has made an "emotional connection" with the reader. One way to do this is for the writer to create an emotional bond between the reader and the protagonist of your story. How can the writer test this?

Assignment: "Ask a friend or a critique group member to read the opening pages of your novel and to place a star next to the point where he begins to feel an emotional bond with your central character. Does this point match up with what you intended? If it doesn't, rework the way the hook is presented. Are the supporting sentences too thick? Is the focus off?"

From The Writer's Digest Writing Clinic

Eavesdropping

In his book 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, Gary Provost says eavesdropping is one way to improve your writing when you're not writing:

"Be nosy. Listen to conversations on the bus, in the elevator. Screen out the words sometimes and listen only to the music. Tune in to teenagers' conversations and you'll pick up the latest slang. Pretend to be reading on the park bench, and you'll hear how words are used to convey more than they mean. Find out what people are talking about, what they care about. All of this will help you to communicate more effectively through your writing."

Lou Willett Stanek, in her book So You Want to Write a Novel, encourages the writer to go all out when it comes to eavesdropping:

"You need a cop in your story and you know he doesn't talk like your banker husband? If you live in New York, there is almost always a parade somewhere with a gaggle of cops lining the street talking to one another. Hang around and listen . . . if you live somewhere else, discover where the cops hang out, take a walk, and eavesdrop. It's okay. You're working."

Any place where a group of people are gathered — weddings, restaurants, the mall — is a treasure trove of conversation which can be used in your writing.

Assignment: Collect five snatches of conversation throughout your workday. Write as much about the conversations in your writer's notebook.

The Sound of Your Writing

The following is based upon an exercise from Ursula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft:

Le Guin claims that children have an appreciation for the "repetition and luscious word-sounds and the crunch and slither of onomatopoeia" that we outgrow as adults. She advises that "an awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer" and that the writer should feel free to "play with rhythms and sounds of the sentences" he or she writes.

Le Guin offers the following as examples of writers who play with rhythms and sounds in their writing:

• Susie Asado by Gertrude Stein
• How the Whale Got His Throat by Rudyard Kipling
• The seventh paragraph of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain

Assignment: "Write a paragraph to a page (150-300 words) of a narrative that's meant to be read aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect — any kind of sounds-effect you like — but NOT rhyme or meter."

Three details a day

Assignment: Every day in your writer's notebook, write three details from life. Get into the habit of consciously observing what is going on around you by using the five senses. You will probably never use all the details you record, but sometime you may pull one out for your writing and it will pack the punch you need.

Example:

• frozen waterfalls hug the carved-out cliffs along the highway
• faint voices of Christmas carolers down the street
• musty odor hanging in the air of a used-book store in an old building

Remember to get a mixture of the five senses; also, remember to include details about unattractive things as well as pleasant things.

The Long Sentence

The following is from Virginia Woolf's essay "On Being Ill":

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his "Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heavens to welcome—when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

The preceding is a 181 word sentence. Most writers would never dare such a feat, but somehow Woolf makes it readable. Francine Prose discusses this sentence in her book Reading Like a Writer in the chapter called "Sentences." She says Woolf's use of grammar makes it "perfectly comprehensible, graceful, witty, intelligent, and pleasurable" to read.

Prose questions why "beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant" or that they think "they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild."

Assignment: Answer the following questions . . .

• Is the long sentence above readable?
• If so, how does grammar play its role?
• How does Woolf use punctuation in the long sentence?
• How important is grammar in creative writing?
  
• Would you ever attempt to write a sentence like this?
  

Colorful Verbs That Have More Impact

From Gary Provost's Make Your Words Work . . .

Assignment: Change these weak verbs into strong, colorful verbs that have more impact:

1. Pulled quickly
2. Picked up impulsively
3. Wrote nervously
4. Hit angrily
5. Looked curiously
6. Closed forcefully
7. Departed quickly
8. Stepped on callously
9. Removed clothes slowly
10. Held lovingly
    

First Sentences: Beginning in the Middle

To pull the reader into the story, the writer should try beginning the story in medias res, that is in the middle of things. Some inexperienced writers start off writing two or three pages of description. Instead, they would benefit by grabbing the reader's attention by using action or making a startling statement.

Assignment: In the book What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, the following exercise is offered:

". . . write five of your own opening lines for five different stories. When you read, look for opening lines that immediately pull the reader into the story. And if you keep a journal or notebook, consider starting a new section and adding one first sentence a day—for the rest of your life."

Some sample first sentences:

• Raymond Carver, "Cathedral": This blind man, an old friend of my wife's, he was on his way to spend the night.
• Toni Cade Bambara, "Medley": I could tell the minute I got in the door and dropped my bag, I wasn't staying.
• Joseph Maiolo, "Covering Home": Coach discovered Danny's arm when Danny's parents were splitting up at the beginning of the season.
  

The Action of a Sentence

In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White advise writers to concentrate on writing with verbs and nouns. These two parts of speech give "good writing its toughness and color."

The following exercise is from from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones.

Assignment: Fold a sheet of paper in half. On the left side write ten specific nouns. Example:

lilacs
horse
mustache
cat
fiddle
muscles
dinosaur
seed
plug
video

Then, on the right side of the paper, list ten verbs the describe the actions of someone in a certain occupation. For example, if the occupation was a restaurant chef:

saute
chop
mince
slice
cut
heat
broil
taste
broil
bake
fry
marinate
whip
stir
scoop

Write five sentences, each using a noun from your first list and verbs from your second list. Play with combinations. Here are some examples:

• Dinosaurs marinate in the earth.
• The fiddles boiled the air with their music.
• The lilacs sliced the sky into purple.