Tag: writing help

Inspiration Monday: lost shoe

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Who’s up for building a time machine so we can travel to the past and shoot Ben Franklin before he gets the idea for Daylight Savings Time? I mean, between the time change and having to stay up till 3:30 am to finish reading books about evil dwarves, how are we supposed to get any sleep at all? We’ll sleep when we’re dead, I suppose.

In the meantime, we’ll keep reading:

PenNTonic (last week) and another

WritingSprint (last week) and another (this week)

LoveTheBadGuy and another

Craig

Rebecca

DeMaizeField

Aparna

Kay

Chris

LadyWhispers

Chris (of Ideophoe)

Barb 

UndueCreativity

Eric

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The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

OR

No really; I need rules!

Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before 6 pm CST on the Monday following this post.

The Prompts:

Lost shoe*
Never better
Used to be me
They never tell you that part
Hollow earth

Want to share your Inspiration Monday piece? Post it on your blog and link back to today’s post (here’s a video on how to do it); I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. No blog? Email your piece to me at bekindrewrite (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Plus, get the InMon badge for your site here.

Happy writing!

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* Help me out with this one, guys; all my life, I’ve seen shoes randomly dropped in the street and on the highway. How do they get there? Is there a whole subculture of people who ride around sticking their feet out the window and frequently forget to tie their laces, or are they really aliens who have crash landed on our planet, disguised as shoes to avoid government kidnapping?

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4 Clever Ways to Write Around Curse Words

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Image by Scott Ogle

Image by Scott Ogle

Following last week’s post on limiting your use of curse words in fiction to get the most power out of them, here are a few examples of how to get around them.

In The Cardturner by Louis Sachar (the guy who wrote Holes, which you should read), the narrator, who is a seventeen-year-old boy, doesn’t include any strong language, but at one point explains:

I should tell you that so far, when I’ve recounted my conversations with Cliff, I’ve left out certain descriptive words. It’s not that we’re especially vulgar or crude. It’s just that those kinds of words seem worse in print than when we would just say them in an offhand way. I think I’ve been able to omit those words and still give you a fairly accurate account of what was said between us.

However, if I were to repeat what Cliff said when I asked him if he wanted to play bridge, I’d have to leave out every other word. Let’s just say he wasn’t overjoyed with the idea.

Still, he was my best friend, and when he realized I was serious (adverb deleted), and that it was important to me (adverb deleted), he agreed to play (adverb deleted).

This character gives us several similar asides throughout the book, so this totally works. It’s funny, and when he uses his little parenthetical deletions later on, we know why.

Podkayne of Mars, by Robert. A. Heinlein (the guy who wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; you should read that, too) is another first person narrative – this time a teenage girl keeping a diary. The book is full of her personal editing style (you may remember I used it as an example of a strong voice), so it makes perfect sense when you get to this point:

“He certainly does mean it!” Clark said shrilly. “You illegal obscenity! I delete all over your censored!” And I knew he was really worked up, because Clark is contemptuous of vulgar idioms; he says they denote an inferior mind.

It cracks me up.

But what if your book has a much more serious tone?

The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton (the same girl who wrote…a bunch of stuff that wasn’t good as The Outsiders), is narrated by a fourteen-year-old wrong-side-of-the-tracks boy who’s wanted in connection with a murder. He’s surrounded by people who swear like sailors, but only includes language (mild language at that) in the tensest moments. The rest of the time he does this:

I fought to get loose, and almost did for a second; then they tightened up on me and the one on my chest slugged me a couple times. So I lay still, swearing at them between gasps.

Or this:

“They’re running!” I heard a voice yell joyfully. “Look at the dirty ——- run!”

This can work in third-person narratives as well.

There’s one part in The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (who also wrote…wait, you don’t know who Tolkien is? What’s wrong with you???), where tragedy actually transcends words, as Treebeard comes upon a field of his fallen friends, and says:

“There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men bad enough for this treachery.”

Granted, we can’t copy this, or risk turning it into a cliché, but it demonstrates a certain genius we should all try to learn from. I’m sure Tolkien was capable of crafting a fantasy-world cuss word that would sound perfectly abhorrent, but his choice here was much more powerful. He has turned a moment, which by last week’s argument would have required a curse word, and raised the level of emotion above the curse.

This is the kind of art we should be striving for. Not necessarily to avoid certain words – but to avoid depending on them. Reach for something deeper. Reach for a kind of hurt so gut-wrenching that an f-bomb seems, not inappropriate, but inadequate. 

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Inspiration Monday: note to self

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A gorgeous collection of work to celebrate our anniversary this week! I’m so proud.

Enjoy!

ScriptorObscura (I missed it last week)

UndueCreativity

Chris and another

Billie Jo

LadyWhispers

Siggi

MIQ

Yikici

Lynnette

Craig

Barb

Woops, missed PenNTonic

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The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

OR

No really; I need rules!

Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before 6 pm CST on the Monday following this post.

The Prompts:

Note to self
Time immemorial
How did you get in here?
Strange password
Deadline

Want to share your Inspiration Monday piece? Post it on your blog and link back to today’s post (here’s a video on how to do it); I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. No blog? Email your piece to me at bekindrewrite (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Plus, get the InMon badge for your site here.

Happy writing!

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Inspiration Monday: deadly paper

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InMon is officially one year old tomorrow!

For this special occasion, I’ll drudge up a little something I wrote in the intro months ago:

Happy InMon to us, happy InMon to us. Click the links they are genius! Happy InMon to us!

UndueCreativity

Craig

MIQ

LadyWhispers

Siggi

Barb

Chris

PenNTonic

LoveTheBadGuy

Kim

Whoops! Missed ScriptorObscura

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The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

OR

No really; I need rules!

Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before 6 pm CST on the Monday following this post.

The Prompts:

Deadly paper
The city that never wakes
Deafening
Last place you look
They took it away
 

Want to share your Inspiration Monday piece? Post it on your blog and link back to today’s post (here’s a video on how to do it); I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. No blog? Email your piece to me at bekindrewrite (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Plus, get the InMon badge for your site here.

Happy writing!

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Inspiration Monday is One Year Old!

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Yessireebob, it’s the one year anniversary of Inspiration Monday! Okay, technically today is Friday. And technically Tuesday will be the official anniversary, but who’s to say we can’t start celebrating now? I asked our badge creator Marantha to design some kind of celebratory graphic and she did not disappoint! Just looking at it makes me happy!

Thanks, Marantha!

Thank you so much, Marantha. InMonsters: feel free to use it on your upcoming InMon posts. : )

And here’s a little recap of the year:

I want to thank all of you for sharing your work and for being generally awesome – both those of you who have joined us for the first time this week, and those of you who’ve been with us since the beginning (the most frequent participants can check out their names in the graphic above). But linking to 67 of you would take quite awhile. So let me just give some props to Debra over at FindAnOutlet for giving me the idea to start this, and for bravely (and beautifully) taking on the first prompts.

I really can’t express to you all how much fun this year has been, how inspiring it has been to read your work. You guys have taught me so much. Thank you thank you THANK YOU!

And I am so looking forward to another year!

Couple of things before I go:

1. The InMon book. I mentioned the idea of self-publishing a “Best of Inspiration Monday” book several months ago, and several of you thought it was a great idea. Then I got busy and forgot about it for awhile. In case you’re wondering, yes, I still want to do it. It’s just not feasible time-wise right now. We’ll hope we can make it happen sometime in the future.

2. What do you want to read about this year? What topics would y’all like to see covered in future Friday posts? What questions do you have about writing or getting published? Let me know in the comments!

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