Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Writing Wednesday

I've been busy this week tweaking one of my manuscripts and coming up with PB ideas. I am now up to 18 ideas - only 12 more to go!

I was over on  the 4RV blog earlier this morning and read an interesting post about varying your sentences. I know to do this, but I experimented a little with the first two pages of one of my manuscripts.

It seems that I overwhelmingly like starting my sentences with pronouns!

You might give it a try. Run off a couple pages of one of your manuscripts and check off how you start your sentences. As stated on their post, look for the following:

Interjections - Prepositions - Conjunctions - Verbs - Gerunds - Nouns - Pronouns - Adjectives and Articles

Oh my! It seems like my first two pages were sitting smack dab in pronoun city.

I also found another error while going over the first chapter. Mind you, I have edited this manuscript many,  many times. It just proves that you need other eyes to look at your writing. Sometimes you overlook the simplest mistakes.


Here is the sentence I was speaking of:  I landed softly as he lowered me down onto our feather tic bed. 

Do you see the mistake?


I need to take out 'down.' If you lower someone, it is evident it is going to be down. You can't lower someone up.

I have a few announcements some of you might be interested in:

There is going to be an Open Mic Session at the Ripley Library on Friday from 6 - 8 pm.  If any of you are in the area, come on down. Hear people read their work or read something of your own.


I also found another interesting site this week. It is called Rate Your Story.
You can submit your story (up to 2000 words) and it will be rated by judges who are published writers. You might go there and check it out. Be sure and read all the submission guidelines. It is a free service.


Happy Writing!




 

14 comments:

  1. It's amazing how with each read-throug of a manuscript, we find something we missed before. I find it helps to read the story out loud, too, to really catch the rhythm of the words.

    Open-mic night always intrigues me. It would be a fun thing to try ... Have you ever done an open-mic reading?

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  2. Joanne, I haven't did an open mic before, but I'm thinking about it.

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  3. I actually love the revision part of my PB manuscripts where I get to weed out all these unnecessary words.

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  4. This has been a problem for me in the past.. I'm trying my best to get away from it.. Such words as AND, JUST ,etc. is unneccesary too.. The NetWest from N.C. Writers, have an open Mike once a week.. I learned alot, I always read mine out loud to see how it sounds and catch a lot of things.. Good post..Thanks,Susie

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  5. Thanks for that, sounds interesting.

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  6. I definitely used to work in the Department of Redundancy Department. I have to be very careful about that!

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  7. I have to watch my pronoun usage, too. I'm a bad, bad girl about those.

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  8. Oops...seems I'm guilty of much.

    Good luck on your manuscript sweetie!

    God bless and enjoy this wonderful day!!! :o)

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  9. What a cool tip! I can't wait to try it.

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  10. Isn't it amazing how we always seem to find an error when reading a manuscript. I have the same problem with lowering things down. :)

    I'd read through my upcoming release dozens of times. My editor had been through it several times. Then (the horror of it), the copy editor, doing the final read through, found a character covering their hands with their ears. I still can't believe that was almost published! :)

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  11. Some good advice here. Thanks. I took part in a similar picture book activity two years ago, writing down a picture book story idea a day for a month. I think it was called NaPiWriMo.

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  12. Hi Janet, what an interesting post today! I do that too, it is one of the things I have to always go back and take a look at in my editing. I think that even though certain sentence structures or words may not be grammatically correct, we want to be sure we don't edit out our own "voice". When I look at Dickens, or my favorite author Sarah Jewett, they were masters at capturing the language of their time. You can hear their voice as if they are telling the story. I really appreciate that in a story. I once had an editor go through my story and when it came back it was accurate, but it felt flat, like all the life had gone out of it. I love your writing Wednesday posts! They always give me something new to think about. Have a wonderful saturday ahead! Delisa :)

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  13. I'm a pronoun sentence starter too!! See, I just did it right there! At least I followed it up with a verb. Or is that a helping verb? lol

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  14. Janet-great post on writing! And great tip about the site that will critique writing.

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