Today is one part editorial assignment, one part drafting assignment, and one part teaching moment.
For those of you who are comfortable with show vs tell, passive voice, and controlling tone, vibe, and mood, you can skip on to the actual assignment:
Write your second chapter.
I know authors who write 1,000 word chapters. I know authors who write 10,000 chapters. I know plenty of authors who are somewhere in between. (Personally, I like between 4,000 to 6,000 words, but I’ve done 1,000 and 10,000, too.)
Because the assignment is to work on the entire second chapter, you’ll be left to your own devices for a few weeks. After the rest of this post, some of you might be opting to rework your chapter one again, which is fine. (It is a part of the learning process.)
Remember: we’re after progress NOT perfection here.
Perfection doesn’t exist in novels. Get used to this idea now. There will always be someone who thinks your characters suck, your writing is horrible, there is no plot, etc.
When writing a book, you’re after progress.
And when you’re done drafting, that’s when you can worry about making that progress a lot nicer.
So, onto the tricks of the trade part of the post, which is a bunch of advice tidbits you can take or leave as you see fit.
1: Dialogue should mimic natural speech of the demographic you’re writing for. If you don’t know how to speak teen, if you’re writing for 40-somethings, that’s fine… you want to see teen slang that the 40-somethings likely would have used in THEIR era if possible.
Essentially, write to your audience.
And if you want to sound realistic about teen audiences… you can fix that in edits. Write what the context/meaning is, and then hire an editor who is good at that sort of thing to help you whip the dialogue into shape.
2: Show vs Tell
Tell: “Bob slept with three sisters while camping.”
Show: “Bob emerged from his tent with rumbled hair, staggering while yawning. The tent flap fell, and a moment later, a blond-haired woman with a wide smile followed in his wake, stopping long enough to hold the canvas aside for two other women bearing familial resemblance.”
Showing is the art of giving readers information without flatly telling them. In the show example, everything about what Bob was doing is implied; the reader is allowed to make assumptions about what Bob was doing in that tent with three women, likely sisters based on their appearance.
A story that engages readers and allows them to infer rather than be told is generally a far better tale overall.
Telling has its place and should be used, but showing is the true meat of any good story.
Whenever you write a scene, especially as you get deeper into the novel, ask yourself how you can show rather than tell the story.
Showing also gives readers pictures. Telling gives readers information.
I often use ‘engaging telling’ tactics in the start of a story to establish a character’s motivations and the scene.
3: Passive Voice
If you can add “by zombies” to the end of the sentence and it makes sense, the sentence is very probably passive. Things happen to the subject in passive writing rather than the subject doing things in active voice.
Example:
Bob was killed.
This is passive because “Bob was killed by zombies.” is a valid sentence.
To make this active, you would write the sentence as follows:
Zombies killed Bob.
Zombies are the subject. Bob is the victim/object being killed. It is okay to have passive sentences; I use them all the time to control flow and pacing. When I want a scene to be slowed down and calmer, I deliberately write in passive voice because passive voice removes the immediacy of the writing. It’s an excellent tool to use when you want a more mellow reading experience.
But for your action scenes?
Stick with active voice as often as you possibly can.
… and yes, even to this day, I sit there muttering about zombies when I write, as I need to remind myself when it’s appropriate to use active/passive voice.
Later assignments will include more tricks of the trade that you can use to improve your general writing skills. But for today, I’ll leave you with this.
(It’s been a day. I’m very tired. I’m working at losing weight and exercising so I’m healthier, and it’s been rather exhausting.)
Happy writing, folks!
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