Category Archives: General Writing Tips

By Request: Passed verses Past

Posted on March 24, 2012 | 18 comments

Yay!  A fun grammar test!

I found a great test on Grammar Monster where it gives you a paragraph (there are three different paragraphs, so you can do this three times if you like)  and you need to choose the correct form of “passed or past” 4-5 times in each paragraph.  Check it out.

http://www.grammar-monster.com/easily_confused/past_passed.htm

I am happy to say that even though I thought I was confused, I found that taking this test three times, I didn’t make a single mistake following three simple rules.

Well, of course I am going to tell you…

1.        Passed—Almost always means to “go by” something.  “I passed the bookstore on my way to school.” It can also mean “I passed an exam” (I got by with a passing grade)

2.       Past—Almost always refers to time.  “Don’t hate me for past mistakes.”

3.       Here’s the tricky one…  pay attention.  If you have already used a verb that signifies motion, then the second action will be “Past” even if it does not refer to time.  “I ran past the bookstore on my way to school.”

Take a look at those side by side to make sure you understand:

“I passed the bookstore on my way to school.”

“I ran past the bookstore on my way to school.”

Ahhhhh.  It’s those little subtleties in life that just drive you crazy, don’t they?

I hope this helps!

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What stupid writing thing did your beta find this week? I bet you have a writing crutch, too.

Posted on March 23, 2012 | 21 comments

Do you have a writing crutch?  Is there something you do over and over again, but you have no idea that you are doing it because it feels right?

Mine, apparently, is the use of commas.  SEE!  I just did it again!  I naturally place a comma anywhere where I would pause if I were speaking.

Funny, a beta called me on this last year, and I thought he was nuts.  Several other betas have corrected my commas here and there, but didn’t mention my overall addiction.

Recently, a new beta said (paraphrasing) “I’ve read your blog, so I expected you to overuse commas in your novel, but it really slows down the reading.”

I honestly didn’t even realize I was doing this.

Now I am looking for them like a hawk in my novel.

So, what about commas my blog?

I don’t know.  I might let them fly here.  When I type out a post, you should feel like you are talking to me.  If there is a comma there, I am probably taking a cyber-breath.

What do you think?  Do they annoy you?

I find this extremely funny, to be honest. (Tee hee, there is another one… they just fly out of my fingers.)

I’m not editing any of my natural commas out of this post, just for the fun of it.  This is how I speak.

Now, I just need to make sure all my character dialog and narration doesn’t suffer from my comma frenzy as well.

What do you do in your writing that shoots out of your fingers without you even realizing it?  (Gosh, do I want to put a comma in that last sentence, just to break it up a bit!  ARGHHHH!!!)

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Writing to a Deadline Part 4: “I hate this stinking outline”

Posted on March 19, 2012 | 20 comments

If you’re just hopping into the insanity that is my writing life, check out my previous “Writing to a Deadline” posts or this won’t make sense.

Outlining is not a waste of time

Outlining is not a waste of time

Outlining is not a waste of time

ARGHHHHHH I hate this stinking outline thing!

No!  I am not going to give up.  I have an idea, but I just want to start writing dern it!  I know where I am going.  The outline is in my head.  Just let me GO!

But it’s already in my head.

Don’t you just hate it when you argue with yourself?

My problem is I have precious little time to write.  Half an hour during the day while I’m at lunch.  That’s it.  I just can’t “get into a character’s head” at home (Dog, husband, three kids… you get the idea.)

Writing down this outline when I could be writing the story makes me want to throw things!

In my writer’s group last night we went off-topic, and someone mentioned that after they outlined, the story flew out of their fingers because they knew exactly where every scene was going.  They are probably right.  There is a “bridge” that I need and I am not sure how my character will get there. That is usually the fun part for me… finding out.  The problem is I don’t have the luxury of the time to figure that out while I am writing a scene that might end up getting deleted.  Deadline, remember?

What fun is that?

Erggghhhhhh!

Going back to the outline, now.  I’ll let you know how I do.

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What stupid writing thing did your beta find this week? Darth Vader Syndrome

Posted on March 16, 2012 | 18 comments

My characters breathe.  There.  I said it.  THEY BREATHE.  People breathe, right?  Get over it!

Ugh.  A beta recently said “your characters breathe a lot.”  Hmmmmm.  Do they?  Nifty little count-it trick to the rescue (Click here if you need the trick)

Yikes!  In 50 pages different characters breathed deeply, or took some sort of a breath 23 times!

No No No NO!  She smacks herself in the head.

Now…. breathing.  It’s normal.  Everyone does it, right?

Ergghhhhhh.  I think the deep breathing was a spastic reaction to making sure they don’t sigh too much.  I guess my sighs turned into deep breaths.  Now they all walk around sounding like Darth Vader.

The problem is, this seems normal to me.  If I think hard about something, or I am about to say something important, I feel myself taking in a deep breath.  Some call that a sigh.  Because I do it, my characters do it.  I guess I need to curb that habit.

It’s hard though, isn’t it?  There are just so many descriptive words in the English language that don’t jostle you out of the story because they are too “odd”.  It leaves us stepping, looking, sighing, and taking deep breaths.

Ugh.  No one said this writing gig was easy, my friends.

You just have to stop breathing.

I’m talking about your characters.  Breathe, QUICK!  You’re turning blue!

Whew!  That was a close one.  You guys gotta stop taking me so literally.

Watch for words you use too much.  Trust me, you won’t even see them.  Someone will have to point it out to you and make you feel silly.

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Writing to a Deadline Part 3: “I got something… now what?”

Posted on March 12, 2012 | 13 comments

“I got something… Now what?”

If you’re just hopping into the insanity that is my writing life, check out Parts #1 and #2 or this won’t make sense.

So, I have a main character.  I know who she is.  I’ve written two pages.  She meets a little girl and a dog.

 I stop myself.

Learn from your mistakes, Jennifer.  You need more than this.  You only have two months to write and polish this story for submission.  There is no room for error.  You need an outline.  You need absolute direction and form.  No room for straying.

Was I stuck?  No.  Two drives alone in the car gave me four more characters.  I have their wants, needs, and desires set in my mind.  I know how they will react when meeting my main character.  I know what is going to happen.  I know how it will end.  It wasn’t on paper, but I had an outline.

I went back and looked at the first two pages.  Wow.  They were beautifully written.  Probably the cleanest first draft I’ve ever done.

Too bad they didn’t work anymore.

I took a few key descriptive sentences I liked, and set the rest aside to start over.

In the back of my mind I knew everyone else was three weeks ahead of me.  But I knew where I was going now.  I had focus.

I knew how the story started.  I knew all five character’s motivations.  I knew the plot, and I knew the ending.  In fact, I could picture it.  The publisher gave it to me— it was that odd picture that I could not find a story in three weeks ago.  Funny how that happens, huh?

So, I knew where I was going… Now, I just needed to bring my characters there.

10,000 words writing to a deadline… outside the comfort zone of my genre.

This is the real world.  Here we go.

In the immortal world of Crush the Turtle:   “Let’s see what Little Dude can do.”

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By Request: Lay Versus Lie

Posted on March 10, 2012 | 36 comments

I have to admit:  this one gets me too.

I think the problem is that everyone out there who tries to explain it goes so stinking in-depth that they just make it more confusing than it needs to be.

I found articles that flung around transitive and intransitive… tenses… participles… Ugh!  Can anyone explain the English Language in ENGLISH, PLEEEEEEAAASE?  I mean, really… I am an English major.  I love words, but you need to be able to write so people can understand what you are saying!    (Sorry, that is a rant for another day.)

Anyway… in translating all these over-worded college professors… this is what I came up with:

A few common parenting faux pas have just reiterated the lay verses lie problem from the time we are children.  I have to admit I do this stuff too, but I am going to try to watch myself from now, on.

(By the way… There is no plural form of “faux pas.”  I thought it looked weird too.  I looked it up to check.)

Common child’s prayer:  “Now I lay me down to sleep”

Since this is in the present tense, it should actually be “Now I lie me down to sleep.”

What do you say to your dog?  “Go lay down.”

Nope.  Start telling them to “Go lie down.”

(I am saying dog there because I realized that I tell my kids to Lie down, but I tell my dog to Lay down.  My kids are hearing it both ways.  Yeah, I’m not screwing them up too much.

I found this spreadsheet on Grammer-Worksheets.com. I think it does a pretty good job of laying it all out (no pun intended.)

Base Form

Past Tense

Past Participle

Present Participle
lie (to stretch   out, recline) lay lain lying
lay (to place, to   put) laid laid laying

Now, do you notice what I notice?  Look at the past tense of “Lie”

Let’s not make it too confusing now!

I wrote a post yesterday saying “As I lay on the table”.  I was reading up on all this and I thought, “Crud, I didn’t lay on the table, I guess I lied on the table.—No, maybe it’s lie.”  I was all ready to go back and change it while I was researching this, until I found this chart.  You can lie down on a table, but two days ago, you lay on the table.  I was actually right the first time.

What I suggest you do if you struggle with this, is copy this chart and print it out.  Tape it to your wall.  When you run into the Lay/Lie conundrum, think:  “Am I reclining or stretching, or am I placing an object somewhere.”

If you place the salt on the table, you lay it on the table. If you are going to bed, you lie down.

Easy enough, right?  Until you switch it to past tense and screw yourself all up anyway.

Ah, the joys of the English Language!

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Writing to a Deadline Part 2: “I still got Nothing.”

Posted on March 7, 2012 | 26 comments

In Part One, I told you about this publisher’s writing prompt.  I told you I decided to pass, even though it was a great opportunity.  It nagged at me, though.  I have written two Epic 400,000 word series.  Why the heck couldn’t I do something with this picture?

I opened the web site back up.  I stared at that picture.  I was brutally aware that I was now two-weeks behind all those happy writers that seemed to be all over this story.  I could do this.  I stared at the picture some more.  I put it on my desktop.  Looked at it all the time.  Thought about it all the time.

Had I lost my touch?

“Just do it,” my son says. “Just write it.  Get it over with and see what happens.”  I ground my teeth as my own words came back to haunt me.  (See my previous post)  Problem was… this was a publisher, not a fourth-grade teacher.  They wouldn’t be happy with a “B”.  This needed to be “A” grade work.

I had no idea where to start, so I used a trick that I’ve used in my novels when I’m not sure how to start a new chapter.  I took the character in the picture—  I knew nothing about her, just what she was wearing and a setting.

I sat down to my keyboard, and had her take a simple step.  The wind whipped up around her.  Her shoes got dirty in the mud.  The air chilled her face… I engaged myself into her setting.  I allowed myself to feel her.

You know what happened?

Within one paragraph, I knew who she was.  I knew where she was going.  I knew how she had to get there.  I knew why she was going.  I knew what she had to do.  Her character snowballed in my mind.

Do  have a story?  Well, no.  Not yet.  I need more characters.  I need to develop those characters.  I need conflict.  I need antagonists.  I need explosions.  I need overlying theme and plot.

But I had a start.  And, to my surprise, I was suddenly interested in that woman in the picture.

Stay tuned.

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Lesson Thirty from a Manuscript Red Line: Finale! Summing it all up

Posted on March 5, 2012 | 12 comments

Wow.  It has been about 7 months since my beta partner and I sat on the phone pulling our hair out over the comments the publisher made on her manuscript.  I think at this point I have hacked up and drilled everything they had to say as much as possible.  The rest of their comments are just repeats of the same mistakes throughout the work.

Sooooo….. This is the last one.  Thirty posts in all.

So, did this help you?  Did you learn from this?  I totally did.  My novel is much more crisp, clean, and fluid as a result of all this information.  I hope you have benefitted as well.

Now the only problem is…. What do I post about on Monday nights from now on?

**GACK**  I have no idea!

Here are all the lessons in a sparkly package for you.  If you missed one, I’d suggest going back and taking a look.  Heck, maybe read them over again to get a fresh perspective.

I hope that you have all benefitted from these lessons as much as I have.  I’d also like to send out a special “thanks” to the brave author who was nice enough to allow me to slice and dice her red-lined manuscript for all the world to learn from.

Just out of curiosity, which lessons helped you the most?

I truly hope all of you will have the opportunity one day to add the revised version of the Gold Mine Manuscript into your own libraries.  Once it is published, (with the author’s permission) I will let you know so you can all see the value of good clear suggestions, and the results of hard work and editing.

Introduction

Lesson One:  Write without Looking

Lesson Two:  Do we like your main character yet?

Lesson Three:  Action Action, where is the Action?

Lesson Four:  And Then there was a Conjunction, or Was There?

Lesson Five:  Let’s keep it in the past

Lesson Six:  Watch that Voice!

Lesson Seven:  Where did that character come from?

Lesson Eight:  Magically Appearing Items in the Setting

Lesson Nine:  Written Any Good (Bad) Cliché’s lately?

Lesson Ten:  Girls Rule and Boys Drool

Lesson Eleven: Pre-Telling

Lesson Twelve:  How Are Your Characters Feeling Today?

Lesson Thirteen:  Keeping inside the Point Of View, Part 1

Lesson Fourteen:  Keeping inside the Point Of View, Part 2

Lesson Fifteen:  How Many POV’s Can You Have?

Lesson Sixteen:  Cutting down your Point of View Characters

Lesson Seventeen:  Who are we talking to?

Lesson Eighteen: What makes your story Unique?

Lesson Nineteen: Don’t annoy the reader

Lesson Twenty: Don’t make things so easy

Lesson Twenty-One: Common, and Cliché Themes

Lesson Twenty-Two: Does your Protagonist “Grow Enough?”

Lesson Twenty-Three from a Manuscript Red Line:  Kindle Syndrome

Lesson Twenty-Four: Remembering where your characters are

Lesson Twenty-Five: Bullying for Bully’s sake

Lesson Twenty-Six:  Capital Letters

Lesson Twenty Seven: Fluidity in Action-The Art of a Good Fight Scene

Lesson Twenty-Eight: Very Discreet Point of View Switches

Lesson Twenty-Nine:  Watch your Synopsis

Don’t forget to let me know which one you enjoyed the most!

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Confusing Me and I… Ahhh the never ending quandary of a writer

Posted on March 3, 2012 | 20 comments

There was a great article on Dictionary.com this week about confusing “I” and “me”

Click over here if you’d like to take a look.   http://hotword.dictionary.com/youandme/

Misuse of these two words is really common.  I hear people do it all the time.  Even in my own house, which I try to keep as grammatically correct as possible.

The words “I” and “me” get my husband and me into a rumble once in a while.  He will correct one of my sons, and then I will correct him, because my son was right.  In our culture in the USA, there is so much “overcorrection” of the word “I” that it is starting to sound right when people use it incorrectly.

Let’s take the first sentence in the previous paragraph.  “The words get my husband and me into a rumble.”  It sounds wrong, doesn’t it?  I actually typed it incorrectly the first time (yeah, I am admitting it) because “I” just sounded right.  I then went back and corrected it.

How can you tell if you are wrong?  Take out the other person, and leave the sentence the same.  Let’s try it.

The words get my husband and me into a rumble

The words get me into a rumble.

The second sounds correct, so we did it right.  In this example, “My husband and me” is correct.  Now, let’s do it incorrectly

The words get my husband and I into a rumble.

The words get I into a rumble.

Oh!  That didn’t work too well, did it?  In this case “My Husband and I” is incorrect.  If you are ever unsure, just take out the second subject and see how it works out.

Need an example when “I” would be correct?  Well, ask and ye shall receive!

George and I should have dinner sometime

I should have dinner sometime

That sounds good.  Okay, how about “Me?”

George and me should have dinner sometime

Me should have dinner sometime.

Oh, Yuck!  That didn’t work at all.  So, in this example, “I” is correct.

The problem is, that “You and I” has been so OVER-CORRECTED, that the word “I” almost always sounds correct.  Even to me.  In the first example, I really wanted to write “My husband and I.”

This is a case of English being an evolving language.  As a writer, you need to make a choice to follow the natural progression of language, or to adhere to “correctness”.

Honestly, between us… your reader probably won’t even notice.

The questions is— which camp your editor/publisher is in?

Ahhh… the quandaries of a writer.

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Confessions of a Suddenly Smiling Stepper:What stupid writing thing did your Beta Reader find this week?

Posted on March 2, 2012 | 27 comments

I have to reiterate that Beta Readers are just the greatest thing EVER.  Especially if you can find someone who is almost as anal as you are!

I just had a beta reader finish a 50-page excerpt.  She made some good comments, but the best thing she did was highlight every time I used the words “Step”, “Smile”, and “Suddenly”.

I read over her comments, and initially thought “it’s not that bad”.  Then, like a good little author, I closed it, took a deep breath, and came back to it another day.  What I did the second time, is used my favorite “Search and Replace Tip” to count how many times I used these words.

For those of you who have not read my previous article, here is the trick:

First ***SAVE YOUR DOCUMENT—JUST IN CASE***

Find the word you want to count.  Let’s use “suddenly”.  Open up the “Find/replace” feature in Word.  Search for “suddenly”, and replace with “suddenly”.  JUST MAKE SURE YOU TYPE IT EXACTLY THE SAME WAY so it replaces it with exactly the same word.  When you “Replace All” it will give you a count of how many times it replaced “suddenly”.  BOOM! You now know how many times you used your word.

I found that I used “suddenly” 13 times in 50 pages.  That means one of my characters “suddenly” did something every four pages or so.  I didn’t even realize it.  Absolutely unacceptable!  The funny thing is, I was able to delete almost every one with no other changes, and it was fine.  It was just an unnecessary word.

She is the second person to point out that my characters smile a lot.  So I did my little trick.  YIKES!  Someone smiled 30 times!  That’s once every page and a half!  I sure to have a lot of happy characters, although many were smiling while thinking mean thoughts.  Yes, I went thorough and made some changes.

Next check:  the word “stepped”.  Holy Cow!  In the 50 pages, it counted the word “step” 94 times.  That means someone “stepped” almost twice on every page.  I knew I had characters “stepping” but not quite that much!  Most of the time it is just to get movement into the story, so I need to work that out, and give them different things to do rather than walking around all over the place.

Confessions of a Suddenly Smiling Stepper… even when you know not to do stupid things, you may just read over it when it is your own story.

Beta Readers… they are worth their weight in gold.

If you don’t have a Beta Reader, go get one… but keep away from Ravena.

She’s MINE!  Mine, do you hear me?

***she cackles***

MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE!

I’ll set her free in 300 pages.

Thanks Ravena!

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