Craft | onewildword

Jun 15

Four ways to revise scenes

So much of writing is actually revising. Whether you’re writing a poem, science fiction novel, essay, memoir or short story, writing and rewriting is where you fully discover your story and add emotional meaning and depth to your work. Revision is where you have epiphanies about your characters, see new themes, find ways to add symbolism and more. Author Anne Lamott illustrated this idea when she said:

“When I was a young writer, I was talking to an old painter one day about how he came to paint his canvases. He said that he never knew what the completed picture would look like, but he could usually see one quadrant. So he’d make a stab at capturing what he saw on the canvas of his mind, and when it turned out not to be even remotely what he’d imagined, he’d paint it over with white. And each time he figured out what the painting wasn’t, he was one step closer to finding out what it was.”

Whether you plot and plan out your book before you type the first word or just dive right in, you’ll find rewriting a necessary part of the writing process as you figure out what your “completed picture” looks like. The elements below can serve as a mini checklist or starting point as you work through scene revisions. Read more

Jun 10

Use the page 99 test to see how your book rates

“Open the book to page 99, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you,” Ford Madox Ford

You can’t always judge a book by its cover, but you might consider judging a book by its page 99. While you probably know how important first lines are in grabbing the reader’s attention, Ford Madox Ford believed that page 99 was the true test. Read more

Jun 7

2 Comments

Stuck on what to write about? Consider these big ideas

I’ve urged many friends to write. I know they have talent, I know they have a story to tell. But some of them are stalled. They tell me they want to write, but they just don’t know what to write about.

If this describes you, ask yourself these questions:

What do I want to understand?
What makes me nervous or afraid?
What do I believe in? Read more

Jun 2

3 Comments

Write like a 5-year-old

Last week, I pulled out a draft of a children’s story I wrote years ago — actually one of the first stories I’d ever written. I realized that the most striking thing about the story was my frame of mind while I was writing it. At that point in my life, it didn’t occur to me that I had any limitations. I didn’t sit and stew about how to get into the story, or if it was good, or what anyone would think about it, or if anyone would want to read it or publish it. When I wrote the story, I was writing like a 5-year-old plays. Being a little messy, running around (on the page), and just being in the moment.

I was writing because I had an idea, I thought it would be fun, and I wanted to share it. At the time I wrote the story, I’d never gone to a writer’s workshop or read many books on writing. Now, after studying writing and going to seminars, I’ve figured out some of its flaws. Read more

May 30

3 Comments

Two steps to stronger verbs

Strong verbs equal strong writing. Normally, the first words we get down on paper tend to be thoughts, images, and ideas off the top of our head. Revision is the place where we go deeper and discover more original ideas, images, and metaphors, along with stronger verbs and nouns.

The good news is in two easy steps you can begin to train your brain to produce stronger verbs even in first drafts.

Step One: First, you have to know where you’re at.

Do a short timed write or use a piece of first draft writing. One page is good. You don’t want polished or revised work for this exercise—only first draft material! Next, underline or highlight each verb on the page. Read more

May 13

2 Comments

An experiment in form: Channeling a beat poet

I brought a new poem to my writing group last week. They loved it. Said it was the best poem I’d written. I was almost embarrassed at the accolades (notice I said “almost”).

The poem was different than the kind of poem I usually write. For one, it was longer—39 lines. And, the lines themselves were longer than what I normally write. Plus, it was a sestina (a poetic form of 39 lines with 6 stanzas of six lines each and a tercet of three lines at the end. In a sestina, the end words of the first stanza are repeated in a certain order through the rest of the poem). Intriguing? Yes. Easy to do well? Not so much.