Words to remove from your writing

Take 

I haven’t seen any essays on this one, but I’ve just undergone a mission to remove it from my own manuscript, so I figured I’d write about it myself. 

Take is one of those words that we use so often, we forget how unnecessary it usually is. 

Compare these examples:

to these:

In each scenario, a strong verb replaces a weak one. 

In the first two examples, the true action of the sentence is disguised as a direct object. This works similarly to the way the subject is disguised as the direct object in passive voice, and shouldn’t be used for the same reasons. It’s wordier, and by assuming the roll of the verb, it takes attention away from the actual action. 

In the third example, take and grab work as synonyms, but grab is a more precise verb. Take has neutral connotations. It’s a catch-all for many actions. You can take a letter from someone’s hand gently or you can take it from their hand by snatching it away. You need context to see how the action is playing out. You need more words. By replacing “take” with “grab” in this instance, you’re saying the same and more. You don’t need more words to describe the “how” of the action, because the verb does it for you. 

Words to use instead of take: accept, remove, seize, acquire, obtain, grab, grasp, etc. 

Sometimes, when the action of is more neutral, “take” may work better. For example: if Jane takes some milk from the fridge, you don’t really need to clarify that she’s doing so roughly or gently. You don’t want to use a verb that’s stronger than the action itself. 

You’ll also notice that the first examples are wordier than the latter ones. “Take” is a vague verb. It tells the reader little about the nature of the action. In most instances, it doesn’t deserve the space on the page. 

When to use take: 

You can use take when you’re talking about a more abstract subject. You’ll notice the time I’ve used take here, I’m not talking about a physical action. I’m talking about attention, something you can’t touch or smell or taste. 

I could use a stronger verb in this scenario: “it commandeers attention from the actual action,” but that sounds silly. Flowery. Unnecessary. Here, a stronger verb doesn’t provide any more clarity. Nor does it match the more neutral tone of the sentence. Like I said, you don’t want to use a verb that’s stronger than the action itself. 

You can use it when you’re being wordier on purpose. Consider which option achieves a better effect

or

In this case, I’d personally say it was the latter option for two reasons. 

You can also, obviously, use take where it appears in common phrases: “take some time,” “take a break,” “takes after his mother,” etc.

When asking yourself if you should use the word “take,” ask the questions you should ask of every element of your writing: 

Is it clear? Is it concise? Is it adding to my story? 

According to the laws of physics, a planet in the shape of a doughnut (toroid) could exist. Physicist Anders Sandberg says that such planets would have very short nights and days, an arid outer equator, twilight polar regions, moons in strange orbits and regions with very different gravity and seasons.

Read more: http://bit.ly/1kPLXGT via io9

petition to turn the earth into a fucking doughnut

THE STORY POTENTIAL FOR THIS IS AMAZING YOU COULD HAVE TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CIVILIZATIONS SEPARATED BY DESERT ON THE OUTSIDE AND AN PERMANENT NIGHT-WINTER ON THE INSIDE YOU COULD (WITH A LITTLE FUDGING ON TIDES OR SOME STABILIZATION FORCE) HAVE MOONS THAT GO THROUGH THE FUCKING HOLE, WITH LUNAR-POWERED SORCERERS LIVING ON THE INNER EQUATOR IN GIANT ICE CASTLES WAITING FOR THE TIME OF THE MONTH WHEN THE MOON ILLUMINATES THE ETERNAL NIGHTTIME AND THEIR SPELLS HAVE THE MOST POWER

YOU COULD HAVE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SPECIES THAT EVOLVED ON OPPOSITE SIDES WHO ARE BASICALLY ALIENS ON THE SAME PLANET AND WHOEVER CROSSES THE GIANT DESERT OR ARCTIC CIRCLE (HEH) MAKES FIRST CONTACT

THIS IS SO COOL

THIS IS SO COOL

I WANT TO RUN FIFTY THOUSAND GAMES ON WORLDS LIKE THIS HOLY FUCK

THIS JUST IN IF I’M UNDERSTANDING THE MAGNETIC FIELDS CORRECTLY I THINK THE ETERNAL NIGHT ICE REALM WILL HAVE NEAR-CONSTANT ELECTRICAL STORMS

Re-reblogging for the additional stuff.

this is the coolest article oh wow

*George R.R. Martin laughs in the distance*

I fell like I should understand the George R.R. Martin reference but it is escaping me at the moment.

No, it just wasn’t an especially well-placed joke.

Basically, GRRM has a reputation for killing all his characters. A Song of Ice and Fire is filled with character deaths. The deaths are so numerous that people have come to joke about how he kills characters just to fuck up his readers’ feelings.

But GRRM is actually a fucking master at using character deaths. The deaths in ASOIAF aren’t a case of “you liked that character? lol, too bad.” as the GRRM memes suggest.

The thing with GRRM’s character deaths is that they are absolute game changers. Deaths are hugely important in how they shape the events of the plot. Stop reading if you don’t want spoilers and since it’s a long post anyway, I’m putting it under a read more. Keep in mind this is about the books, not the show, though obviously they are mostly the same.

Keep reading

I see a lot of positivity posts about 12-year-olds just learning to draw.  Posts cautioning us to be mindful of 11-year-olds with no grasp of anatomy and 13-year-olds whose characters are all the same person with different hair and clothes, and I love those posts.  Those are great posts.  Keep those posts coming, tumblr.

But can I ask, what about the 25-year-old who just bought their first ever sketchbook?  What about the 32-year-old who’s been drawing for a month and has just about got the hang of a human-looking face?  What about the 67-year-old who finally has time to sit down and learn how to paint like they’ve always wanted?

Not everyone starts drawing as a child.  Not everyone learned as a preteen.  Some people start in college.  Some people start when their career is going well and they feel like it’s time for a new hobby.  Some people start after they’ve retired.

Not all beginner artists are kids, and I just thing the adults ones deserve some encouragement, too.

Research snapshot: "How do I find a name that's reasonably culturally and historically accurate?"

How Stella Got Her Name Back (with apologies; sorry! I couldn’t resist)

My short story Rivka in Port Saltspray called for a character who’s supposed to be coded Roman Jewish. Rome has its own Jewish community, which supposedly dates back to even before the original diaspora (destruction of the temple) and is its own subculture independent of Sephardic culture. I chose this because I needed the character to be Jewish, but speak a language that Rivka, whose primary language is Yiddish (a Jewish hybrid of German and Polish, written with the Hebrew alphabet), wouldn’t understand. The obvious choice was to code her Sephardic and have her speak Ladino, but I knew that with my limited resources, translating her three and a half lines of her-own-language dialogue into Ladino would be a bit of an uphill climb. So, she wound up being Italian, because I figured that I could find people to help me with the translation more easily.

But then, how to find a name that was both obviously Italian and realistically Jewish?

After all, I wanted my readers to catch on that she’s supposed to be coded Italian (I keep saying “coded” because this is a fantasy series, with no actual Germany or Poland or Italy.) But many obvious Italian names have Christian or specifically Catholic roots. I live in a region and consume fiction steeped in Christianity; at one point, my publisher had to rein me in because I’d used “bloody” as an oath without knowing it had Christian roots. I really wanted to make sure I wasn’t using a name that was “off.”

So I decided to google for historic records of real names that were used by real people in the Italian Jewish community. I picked various centuries – the 1500’s, for example. Here’s one of the sites I found. Many were Hebrew, as I expected, but I chose one that sounded obviously Italian yet familiar to English-speaking ears: Stella. (Shout-out to our own Korean-American mod; I hadn’t met her yet!)

I hope this helps some of you who are wondering how best to take advantage of Google when looking for little details like that.

–Shira

Little Things to Remember When Writing about Cool Pets in Fantasy

One thing that is kind of irresistible in fantasy are the totally awesome, sometimes mythical, exotic pets. I will never say don’t write them, because I love them (and I LOVE reading about them) but definitely keep a few things in mind while writing them. 

Jenny Schecter, The L Word (via flakingsapphire)

William Faulkner (via thescriptlab)

Struggling Start: Problems & Solutions for Your First Chapter

Struggling with your start? This is one of the most common problems writers have when it comes to writing their novel. The first chapter is so important. If you’re self publishing, it has to draw a reader enough to make them buy your book and stick with it until the end. If you’re going the traditional route, it has to grab an agent or editor’s attention.

Identify Your Problem:

You’re probably thinking right now: What? What if I don’t know what the problem is? 

There are a few common issues I see in failing first chapters. Look over each of the subheadings in this section. There is a chance that you will have more than one problem with your first chapter. But in order to know how to fix your first chapter, you’ll have to know what’s wrong.

Bad Balance of Information:

A lot of times, writers try to jam background information into the first chapter to let the readers know everything they deem important to get the story going. You want more forward action than background information in your first chapter.

Highlight all the background information in yellow. Highlight all your forward action in green. Then make your view something really small like 30% so you can see all your pages in your first chapter.

Do you see how most of the chapter is in green? That’s a good sign. It means there’s a lot of forward action. If it was in reverse, if there was more yellow than green, you’d have a serious issue.

Lack of Inciting Incident:

As I’ve mentioned before, a lack of an inciting incident is one of the biggest problems I see in sample pages. Not every first chapter has to have an inciting incident. Sometimes your chapter will be too short to really be able to have that in there. This isn’t a huge problem. A lot of times an inciting incident happens in the second chapter. (Sometimes later, but those are rare successes.)

If your first chapter is longer than fifteen pages, try to end on the inciting incident. 

If it’s shorter than that, then you don’t have to have one. Though if you can fit in your Norm and your inciting incident in your first chapter without it feeling rushed, that would be a win. I always try to have my first chapter end on the inciting incident. I don’t always manage this. The manuscript that got my agent’s attention didn’t have the inciting incident until the third chapter (my chapters are really short, between 1,500 — 900 words).

That said … I ended up revising my novel after I signed with my agent and switched the inciting incident to happen almost right away in the first chapter. Guess what? It’s about a thousand times more interesting now.

Nothing Happens:

Do you start with a cliche or one of these many other things NOT to do? Does nothing at all actually happen in your chapter? You’d be amazed how often this happens. Characters sitting around reflecting on their life, waking up to an alarm clock, or worse — a false start. It turns out to just be a play, or dream, or something equally as annoying. Readers hate that. You get them all worked up only to reveal: haha, it’s not real!

Don’t do any of these. Take them out, start your story where it actually starts — what’s your plot? Make it happen. Now.

For more information on problems and solutions, download this quick cheat sheet to help you make your first chapter as strong as possible: PDF resource we created here. 

Narrative, Plot and Story

Original article by Mark Nichol found here [X]

What’s the difference between narrative, plot, and story? Not much, but enough that it matters. Here are the distinctions, explained with aids of analogy, plus some details:

Narrative is the structure of events — the architecture of the story, comparable to the design of a building. Story is the sequence of events, the order in which the narrative occurs — the tour through the building. Plot is the sum of the events, told not necessarily in sequential order, but generally consistent with the story and often considered synonymous with the narrative — the building itself.

But these similar and even overlapping components of composition are further affected by the narrative mode — the techniques the author employs to tell the story. Among these strategies are narrative point of view and narrative voice.

Narrative Point of View

A first-person narrator relates the story by using the pronoun I (or, rarely, if two or more narrators are telling the story simultaneously, we). This device enables the reader to know the narrator’s internal thoughts and feelings as well. This narrative style may indicate that the narrator may or may not consciously be aware of a reading audience. Also, the first-person narrator is not necessarily the main character, or even central to the story.

Second-person narrative, rare in literature, is that in which the narrator refers to a character as “you.” The most frequent mode, third-person narrative, involves reference to characters as “he,” “she,” “they,” or “it.”

Variety is achieved by the author’s decision to narrate subjectively, revealing characters’ thoughts and feelings, or objectively, without internal insight into any of the characters, as well as choice of omniscient or limited point of view: The author either knows all that is occurring in the story or is restricted to sharing only what is known to the focal character. Narrative point of view can vary within the same story, either by section or chapter or even within the same passage.

Narrative Voice

Narrative voice is the style in which the narrative is presented — for example, a character’s recounting of events, or a privileged window into the character’s thoughts and feelings.

A narrator may be a participant, a character in the story who describes events, or a nonparticipant, an objective (but not necessarily accurate) observer who is not integrated into the story. Another technique is to feature an unreliable narrator, one whose narrative is initially or ultimately suspect because it contradicts what the reader learns from nonnarrated exposition or other points of view.

For instance, in the Japanese film Rashomon, based on two short stories, four characters give conflicting accounts of an event. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the title character’s naiveté, a plot device enabling author Mark Twain to demonstrate his gift for social satire, makes him an unreliable narrator.

Note that narrative applies to nonfiction as well as fiction, and even plot and story have a place in nonfiction, as reporters and authors often manipulate an account by constructing a narrative more sophisticated than the who, what, when, where, and why formula of traditional journalism. There’s even a term for this approach: creative nonfiction.

Terry Pratchett (via simplespace)

1k Follower Giveaway~

I still can’t believe there are a thousand of you! Wow. So here’s that little giveaway I promised.

This lovely book is the prize- The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. It’s a brand new hardcover, and yes, it’s autographed!

I’ll throw in a few other goodies too- candy, bookmarks, plushy, that sort of thing. Those will depend on how broke I happen to be at the time and what happens to be on sale once I stop being too lazy to shop. I might include a later update with some information on the goodies or they might be left a surprise. (If I send food, I’ll check dietary restrictions first.)

The Rules:

Feel free to pepper me with questions if I’ve left anything off. All future posts will be tagged ‘not writing’ and ‘giveaway.’

This giveaway closes at 11:59pm EST (GMT-5) on January 10th. The winner will be randomly selected and given 72 hours to respond.

So I never got around to buying goodies. Whoever wins will just be pleasantly (I hope) surprised by whatever I find before it gets shipped. Last day to enter, people! Twelve hours remaining for those in different time zones.

I DON’T LIKE IT WHEN there’s poor representation drenched in stereotypes and I see folks defend the character in question when they should be focused on the fact that everything about this character is fictional and was created deliberately by real people who could’ve done better (see: people defending Claire in Jurassic World for running in heels instead of admitting it’s ridiculous for the writers/directors to have had her do it in the first place / people defending Leia’s metal bikini as “she’s still badass and can be sexy too!” when she was already badass and sexy without being degraded for fanboy boners and that whole scene could’ve gone differently but was written/directed that way).

“This actor is actually Latinx! There are light-skinned Latinx and for you to say this actor shouldn’t play this character, you’re erasing their identities” but this casting was a deliberate choice on part of the producers, there are hundreds of thousands of darker-skinned Latinx actors dreaming of breaking into film but either get the door slammed in their face or get to play the most stereotypical, offensive roles imaginable, but they pick the one Latinx actor who is paler than all of my white neighbors combined. You want to defend the character or the acting portrayal, when the criticism lies with the creators who made these decisions.

“Shouldn’t we be happy there’s an actual bi character on this show? I mean, just because she sleeps around a lot and that’s a nasty stereotype, doesn’t make her any less bi, it’s actually offensive that she’s considered ‘not allowed’ to sleep around just to avoid the stereotype” but she was written to sleep around a lot, she was created by actual people who thought the best way to introduce this character as bi was to show a girl stumble out of her bedroom, heels in hand, before showing her making out with a guy by the end of the episode then making out with his sister by the next episode’s beginning. This is not praise-worthy. There are bisexual people who get more action than an Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbuster, there are people who get more action than our troops currently deployed in Iraq, but that’s not reflective of the different kinds of people, of bisexual people, who still face oppression and erasure in their own communities as well as the global one. This was a deliberate choice, and the chooser could have chosen differently.