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                   As Ursula LeGuin says, our imagination "needs exercise. It needs practice." Creative Calisthenics can be a great way to get the exercise your imagination needs. Give it a try. Here is one for getting into the mindset or standing a moment in the socks of your characters:

Ready, Set, Action!

Ready, Set, Action! 

The Use of Active Voice

from Jarmoluk on Pixaby

Writing in active voice. We remember the lessons in elementary school about John. 

The tree was cut down by John—Passive Voice

John cut the tree down—Active Voice

Did anyone just have a flashback involving red ink?

Seriously though, let’s talk about “active voice” beyond the confines of grammar.  Bring it into the realm of writing—fiction, poetry, picture books, a note to your kids.  Whatever you’re writing, active voice can bring your writing alive for your readers. 

Like all aspects of writing, active voice doesn’t travel alone, so we’ll also talk about a few of the traveling companions of active voice as we go through some brief advice about this stylistic element of writing.

A Verb a Day Keeps ….

Passive voice away. Not really, but it is true that learning and wielding new verbs is a great way to hone your active voice as well as improve you Words with Friends scores. 

Can you use these verbs in a sentence?

Sluice, gambol, cajole, decant

Notice that they’re not only active verbs, but their precise, and they’re lyrical with strong emotional and rhythmic qualities. 

Knowing your verbs gives you more flexibility, precision, and prosody in your writing.

If you said, “the rain cleaned the gutter,” you’d be well and good,but if “the rain sluiced the gutter,” you'd have more sound, imagery, and motion just by using a slightly more specific word. But whatevery you do, don’t let the “gutter be sluiced by the rain”—the rhym is thrown all off and your writing will be more passive than active.

For a little fun with powerful verbs, check this out  Verbs on Vitamins

Tighten Your Literary Waistline (Or Waste in a Line)

Another important part of using active voice is making sure you don’t waste any words in a given line of writing.  For me, the most valuable tool in trimming your writing is using a “poetic weed.” The idea there is to weed every line of writing as if it is a line of poetry

            A. Make sure every verb is active and specific

            B. Cut any unnecessary words –articles, conjunctions, and prepositional phrases

            C. Test every image—is it as tight, concrete, and specific as it could be?

            D. Use active voice

            E. Make sure every detail is doing double duty

For more on poetic weeding, take a look at this post on Wedding Your Poetic Garden

Remember—Write, Revise, Repeat

Developing new writing habits is like changing your lifestyle—diets don’t work—and it’s a day by day battle.  You have to

            A. study the writing of other writers who have tight active voice you admire.  Look

                 closely at how they do it.  Teach yourself the tricks. Here’s a look at reading as a                             writer.  Read On, Writer.

        

            B. Practice the techniques as you write. It’s usually better to do it in writing exercises

             because while you’re composing a story, poem, or pictutre book, you want to be in the

            moment, not thinking about if you’re using the right verb.  Stay in the zone of your work.

            C. Revise. You learn how to hone you writing by revising. Notice I said revise—not

            edit. Revise means to re-see. Look at your writing in new ways. Play with it, expand it,

            contract it.  Turn a story into a poem. A poem into a song.  Flex your writing like your

            muscles—sprint, do yoga, run the stairs, find writing muscles you never knew you had.

            D. Repeat. You internalize new writing techniques by using them again and again.  It

            takes quite a few morning runs before you get into the routine of it. Writing works the

            same way.  Overtime, you internalize the new writing techniques and make them your

            own so that you don’t even have to think about it.  You’ll write in active voice as easily as

            you prepare your morning coffee. 

So, Who is Ready to Give It a Try? (AKA The Contest Part of the Post)

If you’re ready to take your active voice to the next level, then follow this prompt.

1. Find an author who has great active voice. Sit down, take apart the writing. Look at how the active voice is specifically constructed.  Make a list of how it’s done.  Ruminate on it a bit.  Hmm.  There’s a nice verb. Ruminate.  Lovely sound quality there.

2. Freewrite for 5-10 minutes on one of the following prompts

            A. A child tries something new

            B. A person solves a problem

            C. A family gets a new pet

3. Go back through and use the techniques described in this post and/apply the techniques used by the author you studied in step 1 to your own writing.

4. Read and reread what you produced in step 3.  Tinker with it.  Oh, another nice verb, eh? I can just hear those words clunking around in your head as you work.

5. Set aside your work and write it all again. See what new things emerge.

Have fun!

Like the results? Grand!  

Post them in the comments on this blog to enter the READY, SET, ACTION contest which runs from 9/1/17 to 9/30/17. The winning will be featured on Sylvanocity: A Creative Community with a profile on the author.  They’ll also receive a nice literary surprise to further their growth as a writer. 

Keep in mind.  The comments on my blog must be approved before they appear, so if your entry doesn’t appear, be patient. It will soon! 

Ready, set, get ACTIVE!

A Tight Write Bite by A. LaFaye

 

Building A Persona: 

The Public Side of Being an Author

Crafting a Public Persona

Craft advice is essential to building a career as a writer, but so is consciously crafting your writing persona. By its very nature, writing is a solitary act that requires us to plumb the depths of our subconscious as we create literary worlds out of the reimagined fabric of our own lives. In order to do that in a way that is not only self-sustaining, but also promotes growth, we need to have a healthy approach to the public side of writing.

Making Our Work Public

In the comfort of our own computer, mind, or office, our writing is a creative extension of the process we went through to create it. We’ve taken a four-dimensional world and reduced it to squiggly lines on the page. It makes sense to us. It’s a fully fleshed out representation of a fictional world we’ve created.  But something happens on the way to sharing this piece with others.

Our work loses the tendril connections to our subconscious, the invisible little lines that fill in all of the spaces others see in our writing, but we can’t see this spaces because we fill them in automatically as we reread. How many times has someone critiqued your writing and your first response, is, “But that’s not what I meant”? We’ve all been there.

Let’s talk about a step we could all take before we ever show our work to others and that is to “divorce the draft,” a concept introduced by Bruce Ballenger and Barry Lane,  in Discovering the Writer Within (a composition textbook).  When you “divorce the draft,” you separate yourself psychologically from the manuscript so that you can view it as a public work versus a private piece of art.  It’s still your story, but you’re sharing it with the world. Now you have to see it through the eyes of a reader who doesn’t have access to your writing process. By distancing yourself from your work, you’re better able to see and accept constructive criticism as a means of helping you grow as a writer.

Divorcing the draft also makes revision exponentially easier because you’ve taken a step back to look at your work anew and can find exciting and inspiring ways to expand your work.

“Revision” means to re-see your work, so if you approach this process with an adventurous spirit— asking, “what new things can I discover?”—you’ll find the critiquing and revision phase to be a much more creative and inspiring process.

Sending Your Work Out Into The World

When you send your work out into the world, you’re often on edge about how it will be received. At this state of the game, it’s important to separate the intertwined influences of taste, market, existing list, and craft.  To know more about what editors and agents are looking for and why, check out the wish list http://mswishlist.com/mswl/by/editor

Taste:

An editor once rejected a manuscript of mine because a central character was an octogenarian and she didn’t really feel a connection with elderly people.  This response was purely based on her own personal tastes and we can often read that as the main reason for a response to a manuscript in statements like, “this isn’t for me.”  Taste is one of the main response agents work so hard to learn what different editors prefer and have an affinity for.  If it’s a matter of taste, you just need to keep looking for an editor/agent whose tastes are more in line with what you’ve written.

Market:

Unfortunately, the market is often the biggest hurdle for agents, editors, and authors. Often all three parties love a particular style of writing or a certain manuscript, but they know that it will not have enough of a broad appeal to sell enough copies to earn a large profit.  When this happens, it’s usually the case where the editor takes the manuscript to acquisitions and the “bean counters” aren’t sold on the accountability of the piece. When this happens, you can try another house who can see new ways to market the book, consider a smaller house that has lower sales expectations, or you can wait for the tide of public interest to change to the genre you’re writing.

Existing List:

Sometimes a rejection can purely be based on the fact that a particular editor or agent has other manuscripts or clients with manuscripts that they’re already publishing or pitching for publication.  In this case, it’s just a matter of moving on to a house that needs a book like yours to fill out their list.

Craft:

All of the above issues are based on the publishing world and you really have no control over them at all.  Craft is a whole different story.  If there are elements of craft that are holding you back, then you need to address those issues with education, exploration, and revision. When you receive comments about inconsistent voice, variations in plot development, expository vs. experiential sections of the piece, then you know that the situation is more about your ability to fully polish the manuscript.  If that’s the case, then you need to go back and dig in.  It’s also helpful to pursue opportunities to expand your own skills with webinars like those offered by Kidlit College, develop writing groups with fellow writers who have a keen critical eye for craft, delve into excellent books on craft, and/or consider coursework in craft.  Making the study of craft a life-long journey is an essential part of your growth as a writer.

Here’s a great list to get your started on writing books. My thanks to Bethany Roberts in compiling this list.

http://www.bethanyroberts.com/Books_on_Writing_for_Children.htm

Most Importantly: Be Yourself!

Your desire to advance your career may often push you to change yourself and your writing to fit the market and it’s important that you’re not resistant to change and growth, but it’s also essential that you don’t sacrifice the unique contributions you have to make to the field in order to “get a sale.” Be yourself. You are who you are for a reason. You have a unique perspective on life and art and writing that only you can share with the world, so be true to yourself and your art. 

Speaking of Being Yourself: A Little Bit About Me

I’m a writer and a teacher who teaches English Department as part of the Center for Visual Culture and Media Studies at Greenville College and the low residency MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Hollins University and I love to offer craft based webinars through KidLit College. I’m also a huge supporter of other authors and independent publishers like Milkweed Editions https://milkweed.org/ who have published a handful of my books and I’d love to see more folks pick up a copy of Water Steps this spring in preparation for facing their fears and heading into summer.  Kyna nearly drown as a child and was left with a pathological fear of water she’s overcoming one step at a time thanks to her adoptive parents, but now they want her to live on a lake for the summer and she’s having none of it.  Especially not their silly story that it’s inhabited by shape-shifting silkies.  This could be her most exciting summer if she’s will to take her her biggest “water step” ever.  Can she do it? Pick up your copy of WATER STEPS and see.

https://milkweed.org/book/water-steps

A. LaFaye

www.alafaye.com

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