October Novel Prep Challenge

Just in case there are other folks out there feeling a bit restless on their day off and wanting to dig their teeth into words! Some of these I picked up as a college writing tutor and others I gathered through writing conferences or book reading or informational articles or disastrous trial and error. These have helped me, so I thought they might be of use to someone else!

The most important rule: Don't follow any writing rules blindly. There are always exceptions. Once you understand why people say not to use certain constructions, you can figure out how to bend and break the rules to make them work for you. ("Don't use sentence fragments!" they say, but sentence fragments are great in tense moments where your character isn't thinking clearly. "Vary sentence length!" they tell you. And that's great, right up until you want to use a whole bunch of really short, fragmented sentences to show desperation during a fight or flight.) Plenty of the guidelines are pretty solid, though. I try to avoid these as often as I can:

BE VERBS:
Watch out for state-of-being verbs. BE verbs include am, is, are, was, were, be, being, and been. They have no real strength to them and take power from your writing. Sometimes, they're unavoidable, but they're often easy to remove. Unfortunately, BE verbs can signal that a writer is telling rather than showing. They can also signal that a writer is using passive voice, which often takes energy from sentences and omits important information.

Example: It's really easy to write something like, "He was angry" rather than using actual physiological responses (accelerated breathing, flushing, clenched fists, unnerving silence, raised voice—however your character responds to anger). Conjugations of the verb "to be" aren't evil. They're sometimes very helpful! But for really tight, powerful narrative, it helps to skim through and see if you can't replace them with stronger verbs or descriptors. "The house is big"? That works. "Remy's voice echoed back to him from the cavernous ceilings" makes a more vibrant image that involves the senses, though.

WAS VERBING:
Keep an eye out for "Was [VERB]ing" constructions. They can take immediacy from a story. "I began [VERB]ing" and "I started [VERB]ing" are some other insidious culprits. Usually it's better to just say "I [VERB]ed," unless the process of "beginning" to [verb] is extremely important. (I do this one all the time, and I hate to say it, but when I make myself go in and snip these, it really does make the story stronger.)

ADVERBS
Evil Adverbs! I know. Everyone says it. "Watch out for adverbs!" There's some truth to it. While adverbs can be really helpful in places where describing things at length would detract from the forward motion of the plot, it's often easy and just as concise to replace adverbs with a strong verb that shows what the adverb tells us. A really powerful, thought-provoking, and unexpected adverb use comes from a piece of music: "Killing Me Softly (with His Song)" The adverb softly is fresh and unexpected in that position. It's not a word anyone would normally associate with violence. However, "He yelled angrily" is... a bit weak, especially because the tone of the dialogue should already be communicating anger, without the need for an adverb. "Yelled" might not even be necessary in many cases. If a reader reads, "Oh, please. You never listen to me!" She can probably already assume that the speaker is a) speaking loudly and b) not happy. A tag like "yelled angrily" is overkill.

FILTER WORDS
Watch out for filter words. Filter words include things like, "I saw/I felt/I smelled/It felt/It seemed/etc." Unless you're telling a story through the perspective of many different people and need to occasionally use these words to signal the identity of your current narrator, they're superfluous words that create an extra "filter" between your story and your reader.

Example: Rather than "I felt cold," a writer might mention the way the POV character's joints are numb and stiff and heavy with the chill. Rather than saying, "He smelled smoke," an author might describe the way the smoke rasps in the character's throat.

Of course, there are exceptions. I can't speak for everyone, but I find filter words are effective in those slowed-down, terrifying moments where you feel like you're outside yourself. In one story, I used them on purpose (*gasp*) when a character witnessed a car accident involving someone she loved. I thought they worked well to show that sort of retrospective, compartmentalized horror.

These have been a lot of help to me before, so I hope someone else might enjoy them, too.