Writing is the process of winnowing our thoughts and emotions down to get rid of wobbles, lumps and fuzziness. You know you’ve understood what you’re writing about when you can nail it down to one sentence. 2. Make the reader care: Structure a series of hooks or unanswered questions that keep your reader emotionally engaged. As soon as the reader stops caring, you um … don’t have a reader 3. Don’t get fancy: Write like you talk. 4. Stay active – unless the passive is serving a useful purpose 5. Go light on adjectives and adverbs unless they’re actually serving a function: adjectives and adverbs are accessories, while their meaning is absorbed by a more potent verb or noun. If an adjective or an adverb serves to cast surprising or ironic meaning, or to enhance the reader’s understanding of a specific idea, then keep it: “killing me softly”-“killing me brutally” ,Cold beauty”-“stunning beauty” 6. “He couldn’t stop the shudder that escaped his lips”; Showing allows the reader to interpret the text instead of being told how to feel: when describing a sense or emotion 7. Keep your tenses stable. 8. Take aim with your writing, and target the reader: Write for and towards a reader. Don’t be obscure or pretentious. Stand in a reader’s shoes. Read through his or her eyes. Is what you’ve written interesting, useful or entertaining? 9. Zoom in and out; Interesting writing is textured. It moves from the specific to the universal and from the abstract to the specific: Could the experience lead to considering how sometimes when we try to do the right thing in life, we get stuck in good intentions? 10. Stay in one skin: Pick a point of view and stick to it.Third person point of view allows you more freedom to move between perspectives but is less intimate for a reader. Readers like to connect with an I. 11. When you’re finished writing, you’re not finished: Rewriting is a crucial part of the writing process where we bring left-brain thinking and ask logical, analytical questions like: does this make sense? Have I left something out? Does one line follow logically from the next? Can I say this better? Is there a more perfect word to describe this? Reshape, sculpt, eliminate. Writing generally improves with every word you cut. 12. Apply the mattress principle: sleep on it 13. When you’re finished, ask yourself, What am I really saying here?’ Sometimes we change in the writing, and what we end up saying is several degrees off what we began wanting to say. Pull the narrative threads tightly through the text to make your work seem seamless, effortless. 14. Read it aloud
Posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 03:49:19 +0000