About writing

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. Successful writing immerses the reader in heightened experience emotional, intellectual, or both more rewarding than the life around him. Dull writing doesn t provide pleasure. We are always moved by the magic people create using words. Make every word count. Get the full value of every word you write. Recognize the power of a single well-chosen word. Wordy writers don t fully trust language; concise writers do. We started collecting words and waiting for opportunities midtussle and draggle - When you encounter a word, make it yours checking dictionary and thesaurus. The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug connotations and denotations. If we don t know the precise word Compare a) Surrounded by careless word choice, the careful writer must always be on guard b) Beseiged by thoughtless word choice, the careful writer must always be on guard Prefer the concrete and the particular to the abstract and the general. Abstract words like truth, beauty and goodness. Effective writing draws its energy from specificity, not from abstraction and generality. Compare we were affected by the news and we were devastated by the news. Use words that convey precisely and vividly what you are thinking or feeling. a) Cutting down all those beautiful old trees really changed the appearance of the landscape b) In two weeks, the loggers transformed a ten thousand-acre forest of old growth red and white pine into a field of ruts and stubble. Certain words are likely to make you seem like a warm, caring human being, whereas others are likely to make you seem like a cold, heartless bureaucrat. Certain expressions are distance-reducing; certain others are distance-creating. As per our telephone conversation last night, I deem I imperative that we meet after school. What do you think about that person who tells you that? One pearl is better than a whole necklace of potatoes. Great writers are meticulous with their pearls, sifting through words and stringing only perfect specimens upon the thread of syntax. True writers carry on an impassioned lifelong affair with words, banishing bad words, banishing bad words like so many banal suitors, burnishing the good words until they shimmer. Be infatuated, be seduced, be obsessed. Simple or elaborate? - Be simple, but go deep - Ruskin finds two phases in his career. a) Sir, the abode in which you probably passed the delightful days is in the state of inflammation. b) Sir, your house is on fire.

But It is not enough, though, to be just simple. To eliminate expressive words in speaking or writing words that intensify or vivify meaning is not simplicity. It is stupidity. Sensitise yourself to denotation and connotation. Beyond the sense of a word is its sensuousness; its sound, its cadence, its spirit. Appeal to five senses - Don t tell the reader. Appeal to their senses. Use sense words, words that refer to things which can be seen, smelled, heard, tasted or touched. Don t tell that the moon is shining. Show me its glint on the broken glass. Sometimes you need to describe.

The beginning
Elia Kazan, brilliant director and novelist said that, the audiences give a film 7 minutes. If he is not intrigued by character or incident within that time, the film and its viewer are at odds. The viewer came for an experience. The film is disappointing him

The ideal goals of an opening paragraph a) to excite the readers curiosity, preferably about a character or a relationship b) to introduce a setting c) to lend resonance to the story
the narrative hook

Examples a) On Friday afternoon, July the 20th, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers in to the gulf below. (The finest bridge broke. The readers want to know why. The hook is the finest.) b) Ramesan fell asleep late one night and left the gas burning on the kitchen range. (WE want to know what happened next narrative hook) c) Graeham Greene opened his novel, She might have been waiting for her lover. (What happened to her then?) d) You must not tell anyone, my mother said, what I am about to tell you(curiosity) e) On the day he lost his right foot, he had been haunted, however haphazardly; by ghosts of the path (losing a foot is not an everyday happening). Try to engage the readers curiosity at the outset.these are the wuestions you can ask yourself about your first sentence or paragraphs.

a) Does it convey and interesting personality or an action that we want to know more about? b) Can you make the first sentence more intriguing by introducing something unusual, something shocking perhaps, or something that will surprise the reader? An easy way to interest the reader at the outset is by the use of surprise.

1)When it comes to shopping for computer, the most important peripheral runs at 98.6 Farenheit and is known as a friend. Here on a stony meadow in West Texas at the end of 10 miles of unpaved road through mesquitecovered, coyote infested shrub land several hundred bearers of a strategic commodity of the United States of America are gathered. They are goats When John F Burns of the New York Times won a Pulitzer for his reporting in 1993, his paper reproduced the following paragraph as an example of his prize-winning style in his reporting form the former Yugoslavia: 2) As the 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling city today, exploding into buildings all around, a disheveled stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his cello from its case and began playing Albinionis Adagio. Burns helps us see a besieged city by focusing on a single individual performing an eccentric and somehow beautiful act. Spotlighting an individual who is characterized, however briefly, is an excellent way of involving the readers emotion. See the two versions first the blah version The Buschkowski family moved from a rented apartment into its own home for the first time today. It took fourteen years for the Buschkowski family to move two blocks. Again see these two versions a) Carl Gardhof was sentenced in Superior Court to eighteen months in jail this morning. b) Carl Gardhof, his head held high as if he had done nothing wrong, was sentenced in Supreme Court to 18 months in jail this morning.

A visual element can always be introduced to perk up a lead. This one conveys the attitude of the person without the clich of maintaining his innocence.

Here is a list of reminders: 1) Does your first paragraph trigger curiosity to make the reader want to continue? 2) What will the readers see in the first paragraph? 3) Have you focused on an individual? 4) Have you given us a visible characteristic of that individual? 5) Have you portrayed the character say or do something? 6) Is there a startling or odd fact that will trap attention? You must understand the difference between the three main components of fiction description, narrative summary and immediate scene. - Description is a depiction of a locale or a character. A visual image. - Narrative summary is the recounting of what happens offstage, out of the readers sight and hearing, a scene that is told rather than shown.-An immedicate scene happens in front of the reader, is visible, and therefore filmable. Thats an important test. If you cant film a scene, it is not immediate.

Nouns
You must understand the importance of nouns in a story. They can convey vivid and powerful emotions. Nouns should be strong. 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) Prefer the familiar word to the grandiose Prefer the single word to the circumlocution Prefer the short to the long word Prefer the standard to the off beat Prefer the specific to the general Prefer the definite to the vague

Abode, dwelling house --- manor, bungalow Choosing the right noun means exploring the layers os a word. First, it must be precise, conveying the exact image you are rendering: pick bungalow if you re describing a one-story house with a low-pitched roof. Second, your noun must be rich, its connotations conjuring a realm of emotion or sensation: stay with bungalow if you re capturing coziness, a homey atmosphere. Brand names, when they work, are killer nouns pithy and packed with meanings. Memorable brands are nouns so evocative that they become synonymous with the thing they name. (Half-a-corona of Detective Maxin or Dry Martinishaken not stirred in Bond).

Descriptions of people, places or things require powerhouse nouns. Good character sketches focus right in on concrete details. (Somebody wearing a sherlock holmes hat). Precise images give us a snapshot of a person. No need to lead up adjectives.

Pronouns
The third-person pronouns allow us to recede. The author is allowed to comment from outside. Most news and features we have to adopt that. In some cases like food writing and travel, we can use Ist person. Mind it, we are imposing ourselves over other people. We also use the second person, You, to engage the reader. Keeping pronouns straight is as important to writing as keeping a firm hand to the rudder is to sailing. Your biggest trouble with pronouns will come is you lose sight of the antecedent when a pronoun drifts away from its antecedent meaning gets lost. Eg: The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind, and they can be seen in the church basement Friday afternoon. Does they refer to clothing or the ladies?

Verbs
They add drama to the random grouping of other words. They kick-start sentences. Without them words just cluster together in suspended animation, waiting for something to click. Verbs Dynamic and Static Static am, are was, were , appear become, seem, prove, remain, look, taste, smells, feels, sounds. Dynamic pound, kill, run, dash, sleep, jump, Sometimes verbs gather around other verbs for support- helping verbs may, might, could, would,-attaching to the verbs verb phrase. More than any other part of speech, it is the verb that determines whether a writer is a wimp or a wizard. Novices tend to rely on is and other static verbs and lose momentum by stumbling into passive voice. The pros make strong nouns and dynamic verbs the heart of their style; verbs make their prose quiver. Even experienced writers pepper their first draft with static verbs. Some writers devote one entire rewrite to verbs, circling every static is and are and trying to replace them as many as possible. Another way to tone up the prose is eliminate the passive voice. The active voice is strong, direct and muscular. Though he preferred to remain above the fray, he didn t seem to have lost his gut for pop culture.

He never lost his gut for popular culture. Why wimp out and say his job seems rewarding ? Take a stand. Say it pays off. Other miscellaneous wimps does, get, go, has, put are technically dynamic words but they do nothing in a sentence. Turn he has a plan to to he plans to. The team had ten losses to the team lost ten games. Her speech caused me to blush to I blushed, hearing her speech. Notice the verbs in this piece, In the Fire, on baseball s unseen hero, the catcher, whose many motions go unnoticed as the fans keep their eyes not on hism, but on the ball. 3) Consider the catcher. Bulky, thought-burdened, unclean, he retrieves his cap and mask from the ground(where he has flung them moments ago, in mid-crisis) and moves slowly again to his workplace. He whacks the cap against his leg, producing a puff of dust, and settles it in place, its bill astern, with an oddly feminine gesture, and then reversing the movement, pulls on the mask and firms it with a soldierly downward tug. Armored, he sinks into his squat, punches his mitt, and becomes wary, balanced and ominous; his bare right hand rests casually on his thigh while he regards, through the portcullis, the field and deployed fielders, the batter, the base runner, his pitcher, and the state of the world, which he now, for a waiting instant, holds in sway. The hand dips between his thighs, semaphoring a plan, and all of us--players and umpires and we in the stands- lean imperceptibly closer, zoom-lensing to a focus, as the pitcher begins his motion and the catcher half rises and puts up his thick little target, tensing himself to deal with whatever comes next, to end what he has begun. These motions-or most of them-, anyway, are repeated a hundred and forty times by each of the catchers in the course of a single game, and are the most familiar and the least noticed gestures in the myriad patterns of baseball. The catcher has more equipment and more attributes than players at the other positions. He must be large, brave intelligent, alert, stolid, foresighted, resilient, fatherly, quick, efficient, intuitive, and impregnable. These scoutmaster traits are counterbalanced, however, by one additional entry catching s bottom line. Most of all, the catcher is invisible. Passive voice Every style maven since Aristotle has urged writers to use the active voice. Tell me which of these is stronger: It has come to our attention that We notice that . Sometimes a writer does without other parts of speech altogether, letting a verb demand your complete attention. Listen! Called the imperative, this form of verb is bracing and bold. It lets the writer address the reader directly and powerfully.

Adjectives
Mark Twain once said, when you catch an adjective, kill it. I don t mean utterly, but kill most of them. Adjectives are consorts, never attending a party alone, preferring to hook on the arm of a sturdy noun. They modify their companions. Use precise adjectives. Why use the generic yellow, given the options: bamboo, butter, canary, mustard, ochre, dandelion, lemon, saffron, turmeric and yolk? Sweet-potato-colored legs , and her belly the tawny gold of and autumn cornfield. Look at the adjectives that Diane Ackerman uses in the description of a monkey named Jenny: 4) Golden tufts of fur stick out between the fingers and toes, which have small round pads at the base of each claw. Her long, slender fingers were made for reaching into narrow places, where insects may lurk. I have seen lithe, graceful hands like these in the paintings of Thai dancers. Stroking the dark pads on her feet, I m surprised to discover them soft and yielding On Jenny s small nose, two thin nostrils angle away from each other. A slight, upside down curve is the natural shape of her mouth, as if she were caught in a perpetual pout. Gold whiskers sprout from her chin, and a widow s peak of canary yellow leads to a full golden mane encircling her head. Her tiny, guitar pick-shaped tongue, flicking in and out, has a deep grove down the centre. Golden lion tamarins give off a pungent odour. Burying my nose in Jenny s chest, I inhale deeply the aroma of hot gingerbread mixed with drenched wheat. None of these are filler words. They enhance the description. Be selective while you choose your adjectives. Boiling down from an excess of ideas to an essence of a thing. But be careful adjectives hauled up to support weak, generic imprecise nouns. Result is imprecision. (Personal opinion, new tradition, original copy, little baby, free gist, vast majority, acute crisis, serious danger, true facts, limited lifetime guarantee. Partial ceasefire. And don t insult the reader s intelligence. It is no use telling us that something was mysterious, or awe inspiring or loathsome. By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves, and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you exclaim how mysterious! or loathsome! let me taste for myself. Don t tell me how I should react. (Epic, epochmaking, great, unforgettable, inexorable, good, bad, interesting, dull, important. Black Pepper, a singularly distinctive and unique restaurant, has made a well-planned and suspicious debut, bringing a special new flavor and excitement to the Trivandrum city.

Sentence
A sentence brings words together into a stream of thought. It has a direction, a current and a momentum. The sentence of a yarn is itself a min-narrative, a yarn, with a beginning and an ending and

a dramatic arc. Sentences should ne varied as our objects of desire- sometimes we want them brawny, sometimes we want them brainy, sometimes silken sometimes brutal. The best sentences are models of economy, getting to the point quickly. Sentences derive energy from strong structure and packed phrasing. Strip sentences down to its essentials. Clear out the clutter. There are one word sentences. I came, I saw, I conquered. In each sentencette, Julius Caesar showed unity of thought and expressed himself in the most direct way possible. Like Caesar you should put your faith in the sentences bare bones the subject and the predicate. The subject is who or what the thing is about. The predicate is a verb that tells what the subject does. The verb is the heartthrob of a sentence. Without a verb, a group of words can never hope to be anything more than fragment. To tell a story in a few words, think strong subject, strong predicate. No one knows it better than a headline writer, who when he pulls it out, manage to convey the news and the blues with a minimum of words and a maximum of wit. The winner in the subject-predicate category would have to be a headline from the New York Post, announcing that Elizabeth Taylor tied the knot in 1991 for the eighth time. 5) I do I do I do I do I do, I do I do I DO! Like headline writers, the best reporters stand back, squint like painters taking in landscapes, and sketch out the bold outlines of their stories through strong subjects and predicates. Their stories distill the drama into a few select sentences. For power and punch, nothing beats the simple sentence. 6) The man she loved slapped her face. Furious, she says she told him never, ever to do that again. What are you going to do, kill me? he asked, and handed her a gun. Here, kill me, he challenged. She did. By one account, Samuel Johnson suffered when he picked a revised version of the New Testament at the country house of his friend. There in the eleventh chapter of John, he found the simple, he found the writing Jesus, the savior of the world, overcome with grief, burst into a flood of tears. Johnson blew his fuse. The sentence was Jesus wept. So purple prose can ruin a good read. 7) The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved across darkness, crept along the greensward, and with, sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden, amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the frog s deception, screaming madly, You lied! Be simple, but Tame savage sentences, combing through them until every hair is in place. Then muss them up and see how you like the look. Experiment. Be dangerous. Play with words, mixing the curt with the lofty. Play with chains of words. Play with phrases and clauses and dashes and full stops. Mix long and short, neat

and nasty. Notice how McCarthy, in All the Pretty Horses, ever so calibrates his sentences. Like the pace of mounts they re describing, the sentences in the following passage start at a controlled clip before stretching out into a graceful canter as horses and riders reach the Texas high prairie: 8) They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they show the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it ad which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode out under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing. McCarthy starts with simple sentences. But the final sentence, with its infinite phrases and clauses, is as wide and arcing as the night sky. Whether you write short, punchy sentences or long, flowing ones, keeping track of your subjects and predicates prevent your prose from shifting and drifting. Subjects and predicates- especially if they re not strong- can get lost in a mass of fluffy words. This line from a Times of London editorial on July 25, 1815, announced that the defeated Napoleon had arrived in England well sort of: He is, therefore,, what we may call, here. If subjects and predicates drift too far apart in sentences, separated by endless intervening clauses, the reader may give up. 9) The baby was delivered Tuesday by Caesarian section,. With the approval of the infant s family, the respirator that had kept the mother heart and lungs functioning for 64 days so the baby could live in her womb was turned off The baby was delivered Tuesday by Caesarian section. With the approval of the infant s family, the doctors then turned off the respirator that had kept mother s ehart and lungs functioning for 64 days so the baby could mature in her womb. Long sentences - Use of clauses and phrases - If sentences are streams of thought, phrases and clauses are the creeks and underground springs that feed them. Phrases are simple word groupings bits of organized thought that are part of the complete idea behind a sentence.

Sentence variety
The best sentences unify their elements clear subjects and predicates, elegant phrases, clauses which twist and turn and surprise into a strong coursing stream. Simple sentences offer the most straightforward way to get to the point quickly and clearly. But when you want your writing to have the stately grace of a torchlight procession, you can play with syntax and style.

The art of sentence making comes down to variety. Good sentences can be short and muscular and they can be long and graceful. You must play with them. The contrast of a lone short sentence can add emphasis. Playing with long sentences does not mean ignoring basic rules. There is still no excuse for muddy thinking, ill-formed ideas or flooding streams of consciousness.

Voice
Style generates its own meaning. Style is unique and irrefutably identifiable, like a fingerprint, or like the sound of close friends voices. Style in the deepest sense is not a set of techniques, devices, and habits of expression that just happen to be associated with a particular person, but a presentation or representation of something essential about him or her. Different style some prefer the invisible mode- Good prose if a windowpane a transparent prose but by word choice and syntax you reveal yourself- they think of writers the way cricket s conventional wisdom thinks about umpires you notice only the bad ones. But The best writers stamp prose with their own distinctive personality; their timbre and tone are as recognizable as their voices on the phone. To cultivate voice, you must listen for the music of language the vernacular, the syntactic tics, the cadences. When you get your grammar down, when you simplify your syntax, you are halfway to mastering the craft of writing. Then you can make it an art. It is almost like the art of music. Also cultivate catholic ideas. If you are a lawyer, loll about Chinese poetry. Shake up your sensibilities. Discover the rut, you re in and climb out. Slang, vernacular and the colloquial all have a place in writing. Don t settle for the safe. Find language that conjures up fresh images and lit its cadences rise and fall and refuse to go flat.

Lyricism metaphors, similes, images, analogues, (anecdotes)

The first wall of sandy, grumbling white water felt like a barrel of gritty ice cubes poured down my neck. . Finnegan calls offshore winds a sculptor s blade . In prose a single word is often enough to kick imagery and metaphor into gear,. A crippled United Airlines crashed half-mile short of runway while trying to make an emergency landing Wednesday afternoon, bursting into a cartwheeling fireball that broke into one eyewitness described as 15000 pieces. Lyrical writing, like all writing, still depends on concrete images ad strong detail. But the occasional metaphor makes descriptive passages sail as in the opning of this essay about plastic bags stuck in trees: 10) This is the season of plastic bags- many of them white, with handles, perhaps from a deli or a fruitand-vegetable store originally roll along the streets, fill with air, levitate like disembodied undershirts,

fly, snag by their handles in the branches. Trees wave them in the breeze. They luff and whirr like spinnakers and twist into knots. Metaphors must be original, invented by the writer for the story at hand. It has the shelf life of a vegetable. When Boyle Roche, a member of the British Parliament in the 19th century said Mr. Speaker, I smell a rat; I see him floating in the air; I hear him rustling in the breeze, but I shall nip it in the bud, he turned a rat into a bird into a broad leaf into a rose. A century later Donald Nixon tried to save his bro. It is unfortunate that it happened, but people are using it as a political football to bury my brother. (Thediya valli kalel chutti, Achan marichu kidakkunnu) You can create fresh metaphors out of the stakle ones. The meek inherit nothing. Smoking guns to Smoking water pistols . Humour. She is so mean that you have to take two trains and a bus to get on her good side.