Let’s get warmed up and start doing some heavy duty writing-calisthenics. Even if you don’t have a current WIP (work in progress) to work on, you need to always keep writing (I do the writing exercises and prompts that are posted every week on this blog). Free write every day for at least 15 to 30 minutes (ANY subject).
There are two weekly groups, WeWriWa and SnippetSunday where authors post 8-10 lines from their books. It’s educational in ways I didn't expect. Posting an excerpt of just eight lines seems a pittance, but as writers we want to post something of substance. We are permitted a tiny bit of latitude and can use some creative punctuation to stay within the eight line limit. When fellow bloggers hop through the blogs and comment, it is interesting and enlightening to know IF indeed the thoughts we wanted to communicate were actually understood. It makes you tighten your writing and discard the “purple prose” that many new writers think they need to build the word count.
Try it, pick eight (consecutive) sentences from your WIP, put them on separate piece of paper and hand them to a friend who does NOT know the project you are working on. See if that person can tell you what they got from the snippet. If they can tell you something you are trying to convey, like a character’s personality or emotion, or the tension that surrounds the scene, then you are accomplishing your goal. Another benefit of joining an organized and regularly scheduled activity such as this is that it helps you build discipline. In this case you know that every Sunday you have to have your blog ready to go and sometime earlier in the week you have to register your permalink. It’s a bit like working under a deadline and you get used to doing it.
A very good way to practice tightening your writing is to take a COPY of a page from your current WIP (or recent work) and a pencil. Read each sentence out load, then using the pencil, start crossing out any words that do not change the meaning. For example, I said “A very good way to practice…” – but I could have said “A very good way to practice…” and it would meant the same thing. We tend to throw in extra adverbs (modifies a verb, adjective, or another adverb), but sometimes these adverbs are not really necessary. Cut out extra adjectives (describes a noun or pronoun) if they are not needed and you can show rather than say such as “the angry man was scowling”. Be sure to read the sentence out loud to make sure you haven’t changed the meaning.
Avoid redundancy, consolidate phrases into single words when possible, and add descriptions only when needed to tell the story. If you keep your writing tight you will engage the reader with every sentence, your story will keep moving along, and the thoughts you want to convey will be clearer.
Writing exercise: Pick a favorite childhood memory. Write down tag-words about that memory… BUT do it alphabetically. Write down as many keywords starting with A, and then B, and so forth. But do not go back to a letter once you have moved on. Hopefully looking at these words would draw a mental picture even for someone who wasn't there in person.
Writing exercise: Pick your current or most recent WIP. Write down (1) something annoying about your heroine; (2) something endearing about the story’s antagonist; (3) Your hero’s most disgusting habit; (4) something uncomfortable about the setting of your story; and (5) name the one character that brings NOTHING to the story.
