How To make Your Writing Sizzle

Writing and creating stories is such a labour of love. You sit down at your computer – hopefully with an idea in your head – and start bashing at the keyboard.

But that’s only the beginning of the long and arduous process.

Days, weeks, months, or even years later, you have your first draft of a short story or novel. You sit back in your chair, elated and relieved at reaching the finishing line. And then you hit “print”. It’s time to immerse yourself in the story of your dreams.

Help! It’s All So Boring And Dull!

You’ve ploughed through your first reading. But there’s no neatly stacked manuscript on the desk. Instead, sheets of paper litter the floor.

Did I write that? That’s not how I meant it to sound.

Now deflated and frustrated, all you want to do is chuck the whole idea of being a writer in the bin. where did your award-winning story go? Who were you kidding when you started pursuing your dream of becoming the next J.K.?

Don’t despair. You are a writer. And you’ve gone further than many others because you’ve succeeded by doing the hard yards – getting it all down.

Now comes the best bit. You can play with your words and sentences, bring them to life, make them leap off the pages.

Five Useful Tips For Resuscitating Your Writing

When I edit my work, I do the following:

• Kick out the passive voice

How? Rework all the sentences containing “was”, “is”, “am”, “are” and “were”.

Here’s an example.

Passive – “The cricket bat was snatched from Jess’s hand by a furious Mr Appleton”.

Active – “A furious Mr Appleton snatched the cricket bat from Jess’s hand”.

Another clue to look for is the word “by” when it follows a verb: this is a sign of passive voice.

Here’s an example:

Passive – “The roof was blown high in the sky by the force of the explosion”.

Active – “The force of the explosion blew the roof high into the sky”.

• Recruit the strong verb army

Every time you see verbs like “walked”, “moved”, “turned” or “sat”, find another verbe, a stronger one, that will spice up your writing.

How about “marched” instead of “walked”, “sidled” instead of “moved”, “spun round” instead of “turned” and “slumped” instead of “sat”. Se how it gives the reader more of a feeling for the character and the emotions?

• Lose the words that tell rather than show

I got this from Australian Young Adult Fiction on Squidoo Common phrases we habitually use that send us headlong into the trap of telling the story, rather than showing what is happening, are “I felt”, “saw” and “looked”.

Don’t beat yourself up if you still find yourself writing these words; just be aware and vigilent.

• Hunt out the overused actions

I’ve just finished reading a young adult novel that both irked and satisfied me. It told the story of four teenage girls who set out on separate emotional journeys. I only persisted to the end because the author did a good job of getting into each character and her particular struggle.

But the rest of the writing was pretty mediocre. If the author hadn’t identified who was speaking, the reader would be in the dark because they all sounded the same. And none of the charactres had distinctive gestures or habits that gave them their own personalities.

The most annoying thing for me was the overuse of “nodded” as an action/gesture. In one scene, Lena listened to her mother retelling a painful event in her life. Throughout the story-telling, the author had Lena nodding. So every few lines, we get, “Lena nodded”, “Lena nodded again”, and “Lena nodded”. There was no use of internal dialogue to show us Lena’s thoughts and feelings. And there was no atempt to vary her reactions. We could have had Lena closing her eyes, gazing out the window, or studying her mother’s face.

• Chop up sentences

Vary the length of your sentences to change the pace, create tension, or just keep the reader’s interest. Reading your work out loud helps you get a feel for a lot of things, one being whether a sentence is too long. If you have to take a breath while you’re reading a sentence, then maybe you’re rambling!

Short sentences amp up the tension and the pace. They keep the reader on the edge of his/her seat.

Another way to pick a sentence that might benefit from a chop in half is to look for the tell-tale “and”. It’s easy to fall into the trap of just sticking in an “and” here and there, especially when you’re getting tired. But when you read that sentence aloud, it can sound lazy and dull. Try writing it as two sentences and analyse the difference.

Think Of Writing As An Art

I love editing. That’s the time when I can take my writing to another level. It’s amazing how a paragraph you’ve been struggling with one day can suddenly zing to life when your creative juices are flowing and your editor’s eye is on the alert.

These are just a few tips to help you bring your writing to another level. Add them to your writer’s kit and put them to work.

Good writers never stop polishing their work. Just think, one day your lump of clay can be a beautiful marble sculpture.

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