Baggy Pants Save the Day!
Have you ever wondered why feechiefolks don’t wear close-fitting garments? This guy’s experience helps explain.
Mistakes Were Made: Using the Passive Voice
The passive voice is a favorite of academics (“A study was conducted…”), politicians (“Mistakes were made…”), business memo writers (“The shipping department will henceforth be outsourced…”) and other communicators we love to hate. Indeed, the passive voice causes a lot of heartache for readers and writers alike. Somewhere along the line, you have probably been told to avoid passive voice. That’s not bad advice, except for the fact that sometimes the passive voice is exactly what you need. I just used it, in fact, in the sentence before last.
“Avoid passive voice” is a helpful rule of thumb; but it’s only a rule of thumb. The deeper rule is this: Make active voice your default. And the rule has this corollary: Use passive voice only when you have a good reason to.
Conveying Information, Building a Scene
This week one of my writing students submitted a very moving story about the fallout that occurred in a family when a boy received a Christmas present that his parents couldn’t afford. The story started with a great image: “The catalogs arrived in the same truck that brought the bills–a pile of shiny magazines full of things the Kramers would never afford, topped by a pink envelope that read, ‘FINAL NOTICE.'”
Every time you write, you are doing at least two things: you are conveying information, but you are also creating an experience for the reader. To put it another way, you are conveying information, and you are inviting your reader into a scene. I am forever urging my students to focus on creating scenes and to trust that the information will take care of itself.
By “inviting a reader into a scene” I mostly mean giving the reader something to look at (or perhaps listen to or feel or smell or taste). If you give the reader the right things to look at, you can trust him to collect the information he needs.
On Finding Your Voice
Kayla C asked, How do I find my written voice, and how will I know I have found it? Sometimes I have a difficult time figuring out whether I am actually writing in my own voice (and what exactly that voice sounds like) or just emulating the voices of writers I admire.
“Finding your voice” feels like a monumental task, but here is a simple place to start: in your writing, weed out every sentence and phrase that you can’t imagine saying out loud with a straight face.
Line Edits: Land Under Sky
One of the challenges of writing fantasy is trying to create the impression of otherworldly, perhaps exalted language while still keeping your language accessible to the reader. Similarly, how do […]
Line Edits: Princess Puffs
In response to a post about homesickness, Jennifer Monroe wrote an excellent piece about a woman whose homesickness hits her in her new grocery store, where she can’t find her […]
Line Edits: Grapefruit Spoons
In this episode of Line Edits, we look at the first paragraph of Kimberly Wetzel’s piece about grapefruit spoons. We will look at some ways that experience gets translated into […]
Line Edits: Two Cooks
In this episode of Line Edits, we look at Elizabeth Giger’s piece about two very different cooks: her mother and her grandmother. Elizabeth submitted this essay as a response to […]
Line Edits: Mr. Williams
Below is a PDF with detailed comments on Dylan Bailey’s story about Mr. Williams, a sword-wielding English teacher. This piece of fiction was submitted in response to a writing prompt calling for […]
Line Edits: Teacher
Below is JR’s 1100-word commentary on Laura Sherman’s 700-word story, “Teacher.” In short fiction (even more so in “flash fiction”), you’re looking for just a scene or two that is a […]
Episode 6: The Meeting
In this episode, we look at a short description of a church meeting and discuss some techniques for presenting experience to readers in ways that conform more closely to the […]