Posted on

In every season (& on every other page), we turn.

So, recently on janefriedman.com, Jessi Rita Hoffman wrote a guest post about “stammer” verbs, specific words to avoid when writing fiction:

…they halt the flow of a scene. Just as stammering halts speech, stammer verbs halt the flow of a written sentence. The author uses these verbs as if stammering around while searching for the genuine words she’s intending.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
via Alvimann on Morguefile.com

I knew from the first verb listed (“turned”) as problematic that I was in trouble.

Dang it.

I had already taken mental note of the number of times characters turned around or turned to each other in my novel. But after reading Hoffman’s article, I thought it might be fun to do a search in the draft and just, you know…get a real visual.

Highlighted in yellow on almost every other page…some form of turning:

…she turned….
he pointed to the counter and turned around…
just as she turned…
Mrs. Kiersted turned…
she turned to open the flour box.
he tipped his head and turned back towards the furnaces…

–Hello, whiplash.

Then this, my favorite, on page 14 of my draft:

Because, it won’t be the first time someone has turned….

And clearly, it won’t be the last. The process of writing may not always be fun, but it sure is funny.

Check out the rest of Hoffman’s article, as she offers one more troublesome verb and some simple fixes.

What’s spinning around in your draft–over and over–these days?

Posted on

Quotables from dog-eared pages

This one from the Winter 2015, Lost Truths & Family Legends issue of Creative Nonfiction, which I (for some odd reason) kept under piles of papers for two seasons. No one knows why, but we discover (or rediscover) what we need when the time is right.

PicsArt

Like poetry. #AmWriting

Read Doyle’s entire essay HERE on Creative Nonfiction. Better yet, buy the issue; after all, it’s about holding the paper in hand, reading the words out loud, underlining your own favorite parts.

Posted on

Smell: The Expressway to Memory

It’s nothing new to say our sense of smell is an expressway to memory.

file000284162710One whiff of black pavement on a hot day, and I am at Six Flags in the heat of summer during the late ’70’s.

My dad worked a mile or two away, so he would drop my sisters and me off for the entire day. We’d run circles through the amusement park, make repeat rides on the Shock Wave, cool off in the Cave Ride, and go home exhausted from the heat but charged in fun with our feet covered in black tar residue.

In Naming the World, Bret Anthony Johnston writes about the power of sensory details in fiction or in nonfiction, reminding us that great details simply pull at “snatches of memory and image,” allow readers to fill in the rest:

The most affecting descriptive writing results from an author’s providing not a linguistic blueprint of a library but the raw material (the air tinged with the scent of old pages, the shafts of dusty light diffused through window slats, the whispers, like trickling water, of the librarians behind the oval reference desk) from which the reader can erect her own library.

IMG_0695Recently, Kim Suhr from Red Oak Writing visited the group of writers at Harwood Place. I love inviting visiting teachers to this group not only because they bring a fresh perspective on craft and critique but because they often bring new exercises as well.

Kim talked about sensory details and walked the writers through the beginnings of a wonderful exercise that taps into memory through smell and opens the door for story.

IMG_0696She asked the group for a list of smells that evoke strong reactions, good or bad. The exercise: choose one from the list and write on it, starting with the sentence, “I smell ________, and I am _______.”

I smell skunk, and I am on a two-lane road in the middle of Texas….

Where are you?