Writing Craft

19 08, 2024

The Slippery Slope of Perfectionism

By |2024-08-18T15:38:33-05:00August 19th, 2024|writing, Writing Craft|1 Comment

As I rewrote the beginning sentence of my WIP (work in progress) for the jillionth time, I realized that I was striving for the perfect opening hook instead of moving on with the story.

The need for perfection can stymie all of us.

The dictionary defines PERFECTION two ways:

  1. a quality, trait, or feature of the highest degree of excellence
  2. the highest degree of proficiency, skill, or excellence, as in some art

Creating something perfect is not a bad goal—until that need leads to perfectionism where you regard anything short of perfect as unacceptable.

According to Psychologytoday.com, perfectionists regard life as an endless report card on accomplishments or looks, which is a fast track to unhappiness, depression, and eating disorders.

Perfectionists focus on avoiding failure and miss all the joy of learning from mistakes.

Sadly, it’s easy to slip into the perfection trap.  Fear of a lengthy revision letter brought out my desire to produce a perfect opening. All I ended up doing was road-blocking myself.

This Hemingway quote is a great reminder for writers when the slippery slope of perfectionism threatens.

Image by Michael Schwarzenberger Pixabay.com 453796

Writer or not,  maybe the quote can help when the slippery slope of perfectionism threatens.

12 08, 2024

Spell Checkers and Grammar Checkers – Beware!

By |2024-08-11T15:39:14-05:00August 12th, 2024|writing, Writing Craft|0 Comments

If you use a computer or a cell phone, you  likely have a spell checker and/or grammar checker running when you type. It can be helpful and save embarrassing mistakes.

Or not.

Thanks to something called the Cupertino Effect where a spell checker erroneously replaces mistakes with correctly spelled words that are not correct in the sentence.

The name comes from the unhyphenated English word “cooperation” often being changed to “Cupertino” by older spell checkers.

This poem composed in 1992 by Dr. Jerrold H. Zar demonstrates the issue with autocorrect. Read these first three stanzas aloud and you’ll see the full impact of Cupertinos.

CANDIDATE FOR A PULLET SURPRISE

I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it’s weigh.
My checker tolled me sew.

A checker is a bless sing,
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me right awl stiles two reed,
And aides me when eye rime.

Although all the spelling is correct, the words are faulty. Mark Eckman offers insight into “The Spell Checker Poem’s” here along with a read of the full poem.

The poem is a cautionary tale for all of us who place too much trust in our computer’s spell checker. An equal warning is true of computer Grammar checkers and Editors.

Writers, particularly, must be watchful. Publisher house style guides do not necessarily follow standard writing styles so auto-corrected grammar can create issues.

The Oxford comma is a fitting example. Some publishers prefer to use it. Others don’t. Grammar checkers will always tag if it’s missing in a series.

Unless, of course, you set preferences in the program.

Grammar editors also don’t allow for a writer’s voice. My grammar checker flags my sentences all the time.

Example: “At the same time, she was different, changed.”

Grammar Program Correction: “At the same time, she was different, [and] changed.”

Correct but not my writer’s voice.

Example: “He wasn’t arguing relationships.”

Grammar Program Correction: “He wasn’t arguing [about] relationships.”

Again, correct grammatically but not what the speaker said.

My favorite example is the cell phone autocorrect which always changes its to it’s.

Or we’ll to well.

With AI controlling spell checkers and grammar programs more and more,  corrections need a much closer human eye to keep the meaning clear.

Grammar-editor programs and spell checkers are only as good as the user.

Do you have any examples with your spell checker or grammar editor software? Share in the comments.

6 05, 2024

Kill the Darlings – Drama on every page

By |2024-04-30T07:32:04-05:00May 6th, 2024|Writer's Corner, Writing Craft|0 Comments

We all dislike negative, unhappy things happening in our lives.

Who wants to suffer and be unhappy? I sure don’t.

Reality is drama, disaster, and tragedy are what life is all about.

I don’t like drama in my life. I don’t like it when other people suffer and are unhappy. Unfortunately in fiction writing no drama makes for a dull, uninteresting plot.

A story without tension is flat and quickly put aside. That’s not what any author wants to happen to their books.

The BONI Intensive Seminars taught me how important suffering and drama are for fictional characters … if a writer wants to fully engage readers.

Tension on every page” to quote Donald Maass.

“Throw another bear in the canoe,” JoAnn Ross advises.

Drama is an integral part of real life and a critical part of a fictional character’s story. Readers want to become emotionally involved with our characters. Drama builds suspense, anticipation, and uncertainty by creating conflict, and it’s that conflict that keeps readers turning the pages.

When drama and suffering are absent, readers do not connect with our characters and story. They don’t read our books. I’ve had to learn to “kill my darlings”  and it hasn’t been easy.

If you need a nudge to add drama to your writing, let me suggest:

  1. The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass
  2. Breakout Novel Intensive Seminar
  3. One Stop for Writers where you’ll find loads of resources for adding conflict.

And keep an eye out for the 2nd edition of The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Stress and Volatility by Becca Puglisi, releasing on May 13th.

Writers, what suggestions would you add to my list?

4 03, 2024

Hooks and Scrabble

By |2024-03-04T09:11:57-06:00March 4th, 2024|Writer's Life, Writing Craft|0 Comments

Scrabble is popular at our house. The game is all about words. Guess that’s why I love it.

Scrabble players can score fifty points when they have the right tiles, the perfect fit to play on the board and know the RIGHT word. Hubby-dear is our current fifty-point champion.

Scrabble players earn points from the words they create. Writers keep the reader hooked into turning the pages with their words.

A hook is what incites the reader to turn the page and read just one more chapter. Or decide to buy a book. In writing, hooks are words used at the beginning of scenes and chapter breaks. Screenwriters use hooks the same way.

The hook idea came from the 1914 silent movie series titled The Perils of Pauline. Pearl White starred as Pauline, the damsel in distress menaced by assorted villains, pirates, and Native Americans in the serialized movie. In 2008, the movie was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

In each episode the audience is convinced poor, pitiful Pauline’s situation will surely result in her imminent death until at the last minute she is rescued or otherwise escapes the danger. The damsel in distress and cliffhanger endings kept moviegoers returning.

How do successful writers use hooks like the screenwriters did with The Perils of Pauline? The simple answer is strong characters like Pauline and strong chapter breaks.  

K.M. Weiland suggests these other ideas to hook readers.

1. Promise conflict to come.

2. A secret kept.

3. A major decision or vow.

4. An announcement of a shocking event.

5. A moment of high emotion.

6. A reversal or surprise that turns the story upside down.

7. A new idea.

8. An unanswered question.

9. A portentous metaphor.

10. A plot turning point.

Weiland warns: “Not every chapter needs to end with a cliffhanger, but they do need to encompass a question powerful enough to make the reader crazy to know the answer.”

Unlike the silent movie success, the overuse of Pauline-in-peril gimmicks in stories can turn a reader off. Writers use caution.

If you’re a writer, what strategy do you use for hooks? If not sure, check out Mary Buckham’s Writing Active Hooks for great ideas.

As a reader, what hook from Weiland’s list keeps you turning the page?

16 10, 2023

Dictionary Day

By |2023-10-12T08:43:54-05:00October 16th, 2023|Holidays, Writer's Life, Writing Craft|1 Comment

This day honors Noah Webster, the man who fathered the American Dictionary. It’s one of my favorite holidays because I love dictionaries.

As a child, I’d spend hours poring through the pages of my grandmother’s eight-inch-thick Webster’s New International Dictionary (of the English Language). It was a fertile resource for a blossoming logophile or, as I prefer to call myself – a wordsmith.

The ancient leather-bound book with its India-skin paper had leather alphabet tabs cut into the pages. The detailed illustrations and maps are gorgeous. There were diagrams, charts, and thousands of words.

With so many dictionary resources readily available online, it’s easy to believe a hard copy isn’t necessary anymore. I disagree. Every home should have at least one realio-trulio paper dictionary available.

All sorts of wonderful magical stuff can happen when you use a hardcopy dictionary instead of looking up definitions online.

Your finger glides over other words as it scrolls down the printed page. Words that you might never have seen right there at your fingertips. You can see a word’s origin and its root without clicking to a different screen for synonyms and antonyms.

Yes, all that’s included with online dictionaries, but do you scroll down to discover the rest of the entry?

Probably not.

Understanding meaning is important. I learned that from my British antiques business partner. His British accent and my Texas drawl tended to muddle discussions and complicate purchases for the shop when the English and American definitions didn’t match. The King’s English Dictionary he gave me saved us many times over.

Spelling can be a problem no matter what type of dictionary you use. I stump spell checkers 90% of the time. Plus, spell checkers don’t give definitions.

I keep 20,000 WORDS by Louis A. Leslie side-by-side with my dictionary for fast lookup of commonly misspelled words. This little jewel gets me through my writing day.

While you may never love dictionaries as I do, I still recommend you have a hard-copy dictionary handy. You never know what you might learn.

5 06, 2023

What’s a Meet-Cute?

By |2023-06-04T11:26:41-05:00June 5th, 2023|writer, Writer's Corner, Writing Craft|2 Comments

You may recognize the phrase meet cute from reviews for movies, television shows, and books.

Romance readers know it as a major part of the Rom-Com subcategory.

Recently the word was the Merriam-Webster word of the day.

That surprised me. I think of meet-cute as a specific vocabulary term limited to use by romance and scriptwriters or reviewers of those books and films.

Turns out it’s been around since 1952 when the two words, meet and cute, were paired in a The New York Times Book Review to describe the story of a ghost-writer who falls in love with a ghost. Today the linked words are used frequently to reference books, movies, and television.

Officially, the definition is “a cute, charming, or amusing first encounter between romantic partners. A meet-cute can be such an encounter as shown in a movie or television show, or one that happens in real life.”

Meet Cute is a popular fiction writing troupe. FYI: Troupe is another writer’s vocabulary word meaning a plot device for crafting a story. Read more about troupes here.

Romance authors use meet-cutes by creating situations where characters clash in personality, set up an embarrassing situation where two eventual romantic partners meet, or have a misunderstanding between characters that may or may not lead to reconciliation in the end.

Meet cute isn’t often found in everyday usage, but people do share their first meet-cutes in conversation and many married couples return to the location where they first met to take pictures on the anniversary of their first encounter.

If you’re a romance rom-com writer or reader, it’s a vocabulary must. If you’re not, now you know the meaning.

20 03, 2023

Choosing Names

By |2023-03-19T14:05:17-05:00March 20th, 2023|Writing Craft|0 Comments

Coming up with the character names for a new book is like being pregnant in a way. You have all these people to name.

Sometimes that’s easy. Sometimes it’s not. Sorta like childbirth.

Many authors use placeholder letters for names and then fill in later with the names they’ve chosen using search and replace.

I can’t do that. Without specific names, it’s hard for me to visualize the story.

Once I have the characters and setting clearly in my head, I feel like I have bona fide people and places and can unravel the story.

That’s why I choose names before I write a single word and there is a lot to consider besides gender.

  • Is the name easily pronounceable or easily sounded out?
  • Do the first name and surname sound good together?
  • Do the names start with the same letter or sound similar?
  • Are the names appropriate for the story setting, era, and genre?
  • Have I varied syllables and lengths?

Two sites help me come up with options:  naming your child and naming pets. Name generator sites are also helpful too.  Even if you’re not writing a book, name generators can be fun to play with.

I use these two:

Character Name Generator – You fill in several different defining factors and you get options that fit your character.

Name Generator for Fun – This one offers several categories to choose from. If you have a dragon to name, it’s got suggestions.

After weeks of searching for names, I finally settled on Gus, MaryDee, Willa, Claudia, Todd, and Kayley. Now on with the story.

25 10, 2021

I missed Punctuation and Grammar Days

By |2021-10-18T12:36:06-05:00October 25th, 2021|writing, Writing Craft|0 Comments

Neither are official-official holidays so there are no consequences. I’ll do better next year getting my blogs up on the actual dates, but in the meantime, here is my white-rabbit-late blog.

If you’re not familiar with the designation, both days are set aside to celebrate the underappreciated art of using correct grammar.

Jeff Rubin selected Sept. 24 in 2004 to be National Punctuation Day as “a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipses.”

Martha Brockenbrough, founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, added March 4 as National Grammar Day to encourages everyone to use grammar correctly in both verbal and written language.

I love the reasoning behind the date. The National Grammar Day website states. “Language is something to be celebrated, and March 4 is the perfect day to do it. It’s not only a date, it’s an imperative: March forth on March 4 to speak well, write well, and help others do the same!”

These days our communication relies increasingly on our written word skills. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t email or text or post comments on social media. Correct grammar and punctuation are important.

I always need help with grammar and punctuation. If you have as much trouble as I do, here are my recommendations:

For help understanding how each punctuation mark is used, try this fabulous clickable chart here. Once on the page, you click on the punctuation mark and a page with the explanation opens.

Nitty-Gritty Grammar is a humorous guide to correct grammar.

Or for serious writing, try The Elements of Style

 

For grammar help as I write in Word 365, I use Editor, an editing tool embedded in the word processor.

For Grammar help when composing emails and social media posts, I have installed the Grammarly software program.

You can get the free version or pay for a premium  version at https://www.grammarly.com/

Lastly, just for fun, enjoy this YouTube version of Victor Borge’s Phonetic Punctuation skit. It’s old but still hilarious any day of the year.

14 06, 2021

Moodling, Imagination, and Creative Thinking

By |2021-06-13T13:50:29-05:00June 14th, 2021|Make Me Think Monday, Writing Craft|0 Comments

I recently came across a blog that gave me both a new vocabulary word and a new technique to boost creativity. When I read Musings from a Writer’s Brain–Moodling, I thought the blogger might have made the word up and checked for myself.

Googling the word proved tricky. MOODLE came up, but not moodling. Moodle happens to be an open-source learning management system for distance and online learning. Something that has become a necessary part of our COVID-19 pandemic world.

But that was not what the blogger Joanne Guidoccio was talking about. Her blog referred to the idea of moodling from Brenda Ueland’s book If You Want to Write

Ueland stresses that “the imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”

Urban Dictionary defines the word as daydreaming or letting your mind wander and doing nothing.

Interesting that doing nothing and letting your mind wander will improve creative thinking, isn’t it?

But the fact is some well-known names are among those who practiced moodling.

Isaac Newton was moodling under an apple tree in 1666 and an apple fell on his head which in turn led to his theory on gravity.

Albert Einstein spent days and nights in the quiet solitude after the breakup of his marriage. That moodling period led to his general theory of relativity.

Massachusetts of Technology’s The Writing Process includes moodling as a way to generate ideas and recommends a structured technique for writers

CEOBuddy.com suggests trying noodling and moodling if you’re looking for creative ideas to expand your business.

There’s also a YouTube channel that demonstrates how to use doodling to jumpstart creativity.

Moodling, noodling, doodling, idling, dawdling, and puttering to improve my imagination…

with summer here, sounds like a plan to me.

What do you think?

1 03, 2021

Should a Writer Blog?

By |2021-02-05T15:50:42-06:00March 1st, 2021|Writer's Corner, Writing Craft|3 Comments

First, let me say, writing a regular blog isn’t for everyone, whether you’re a career writer or not. It is a lot of work.

I’ve blogged for over nine years. I know firsthand how much.

Here are my takeaways for all the effort.

  • Improved Writing Skills

Writing, in my opinion, can be learned. Same as a knitter learns to knit. Yes, creativity and talent help. But practice makes perfect.

Weekly blogging means practice not only with writing, but also editing, another very important writer skill.

  • Opportunities to experiment

I get to change how I write and what I write. Some of my blog topics are informational, some are personal accounts, some are thought-provoking.

Blogging not only improves my skills. It keeps me learning.

  • Discipline, Motivation & Deadlines

Blogging provides lessons in all three. Readers look for that email in their inbox every week. Not living up to their expectation is super strong motivation.

In turn, motivation provokes discipline. I must get my butt in the chair and my fingers on the keys to meet the deadlines blogs demand, weekly and for the guest blogs I frequently do. That builds discipline.

  • Discoverability

The magic reward for all the effort is discoverability.

While my follower numbers aren’t huge by most scales, when I send a View from the Front Porch post out every Monday, Wednesday, Friday morning at 0600 Central Time precisely, I get 175 faithful readers clicking through.

If I did a book signing or book talk and that many people showed up, I’d be ecstatic. Blogging is my virtual book signing table that is open 24/7/365—internationally.

So, for this writer, the answer to the question is a resounding YES.

Blogging on a regular basis being the key. If you do that, blogging can be a powerful way to network with readers and have new readers find you.

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