The Narrative Gardener

Tag: #writingtips

  • Grammar Rules vs. Authentic Voice

    Why Fiction Isn’t an Essay

    Pruned rose cane
    Pruned raspberry cane

    Sharing one’s work with a critique partner takes guts, and the wait for it to come back can be excruciating, not to mention the sinking feeling that blossoms when the file opens and it’s covered with colored text and lines. Sentence fragments marked wrong. Verb forms in dialogue flagged. Split infinitives highlighted. Every sentence that starts with “And” or “But” has a note in the margin.

    During the subsequent self-edit, the changes are made, perhaps reluctantly so, but in the name of improving the writing according to feedback. The fragments become full sentences. The initial conjunctions get folded into the sentence before.

    Now the characters sound like they’re reading from a grammar textbook instead of talking like people.

    Fiction isn’t an essay, and the grammar rules that serve clarity in academic (or journalistic) writing can kill authenticity in creative work quicker than a flame.

    Same Rule, Different Plants

    Pruning guides say to cut stems at a 45° angle above an outward-facing bud. That’s sound advice for a rosebush. Apply it to a summer-bearing raspberry cane, which fruits on second-year wood and needs the oldest canes removed near the ground instead, and the next year’s harvest is cut off while following the instructions perfectly.

    The rule wasn’t wrong. It was just meant for a different plant.

    Most grammar rules were created for a different kind of writing. Prescriptive grammar tells you how language should be used. Descriptive grammar describes how people actually use it. Academic writing sits in prescriptive territory, and for good reason: quality and precision are the whole point.

    But fiction lives on another plane. The fiction author’s job isn’t to uphold a rule; it’s to capture how a person actually thinks, speaks, and moves through a world, and all of us real people break grammar rules constantly, without noticing and without apology.

    A fair number of the rules writers were taught in school were never really rules to begin with. Some are the arbitrary preferences of eighteenth-century grammarians, who decided English should behave more like Latin, which is where the prohibition on splitting infinitives comes from. Latin infinitives are a single word (example: scribere = to write); they can’t be split. English infinitives are two words, so the rule against separating them imported a constraint from a language where it was never even a thought.

    Others are class markers dressed up as correctness, ways of signaling education and status that have less to do with clarity and more with determining where someone belongs. Language is constantly shifting. What was correct in 1950 sounds stiff now, and holding a manuscript to that older standard erases the regional and cultural speech patterns that make a character sound like someone specific and someone interesting.

    Many times it’s not a matter of whether a sentence is grammatical or not. It’s whether the sentence serves the story, the scene, and the character speaking it.

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    Where This Shows Up First: Dialogue

    Dialogue is where the gap between grammar and authenticity stands out the most. Real people don’t speak in complete sentences all of the time.

    Grammatically correct: “I do not know where he went. Did you see him leave?” “I did not see him leave.”

    Authentic: “No idea. Did you see him leave?” “See him? No.”

    Real speech is fragmented and interrupted, full of trailing thoughts that never get finished because the other person already knows what was meant. Dialogue polished to grammatical perfection reads like a script being performed, not two people talking.

    The same gap shows up in constructions writers overcorrect out of habit.

    Overcorrected: “It is I,” she said. “To whom should I give this?”

    Authentic: “It’s me,” she said. “Who should I give this to?”

    “It is I” is technically correct and also how no one talks unless they are a butler in a period drama or somebody totally taking the piss. Ending a sentence with a preposition is ordinary English. Restructuring a sentence to avoid it produces a stiffness that serves the rule instead of the reader.

    Different characters break different rules, and the differences are what characterization actually is. A highly educated character might speak in longer sentences and precise vocabulary and still break rules constantly in casual speech because of written diction. A working-class character might use regional grammar flaws, word contractions, double negatives, or sentence fragments that carry more weight than a complete sentence ever could. A teenage character might use “like” as a verbal tic, trail off mid-thought, let text speak slip into dialogue or internal narration. Correct these fragments into standard grammar, and it’s not cleaning up the prose. It’s erasing the character.

    One specific example is the fading of the subjunctive mood in wished-for or imagined states. Formal grammar calls for a plural verb form even when the subject is singular.

    Formal: “I wish I were taller.”

    Informal/Authentic: “I wish I was taller.”

    Most English speakers couldn’t name the subjunctive mood if asked. That’s the point, though. Nobody needs to know the rule to feel the difference in the formal version as opposed to informal. And the informal subjunctive isn’t a mistake creeping into dialogue. It’s what real people do with tenses when they speak, yet many of us know when it’s better to use the formal.

    This is a language shift in progress and is common enough in print that a critique partner marking it “wrong” is expressing a preference, not a rule. Both have their place. The choice is about the tone you want the line to have. (This is one I consider carefully with every case. Sometimes the informal just “sounds” better with the surrounding text, even in narrative prose.)

    It’s Not Only Dialogue

    Fragments in narration are also a tool, not an error. “She opened the door and saw the room was empty, which was surprising.” and “She opened the door. Empty.” are not conveying the same thing, even though they describe the same event. The fragment creates a pause that mimics the actual shape of noticing. Cut every fragment from a manuscript and the prose ceases to feel alive.

    The old rule against starting a sentence with “And” or “But” doesn’t hold up against how often published fiction does exactly that, because the full stop–new sentence construction does work a comma can’t. “She didn’t want to go. But she went anyway.” carries a hesitation the comma-joined version smooths over. Split infinitives fall into the same category. “She wants to double her subscriber count by spring” states a goal. “She wants to more than double her subscriber count by spring” is the actual goal, and there’s no other way to say it. Move “more than” anywhere else in the sentence and the math changes or it stops making sense.

    Language keeps evolving, and a manuscript either reflects that or doesn’t. Singular “they” has moved from workaround to standard; “someone left their coat” has mostly replaced the clunkier “someone left his or her coat,” and prose still defaulting to “he” as the generic pronoun reads as dated immediately. Dialogue conventions are shifting too, toward em dashes for interruption, toward dropping “said” tags when the action already tells who is speaking. The same loosening shows up in punctuation more broadly—the comma after a short introductory word or before a sentence-ending “too” is increasingly treated as optional rather than required.

    Where the Rule Still Holds

    None of this means grammar has stopped mattering. It means the question is always what a rule is advocating for.

    Follow it when clarity is genuinely at risk, such as when a misplaced modifier changes what a sentence means rather than just how it sounds.

    Follow it when the formality is the point, in historical fiction with an elevated narrative voice, or literary prose crafted around precision.

    Follow it when the rule is doing characterization—when a grammar-obsessed professor would catch and correct themselves mid-thought, or a formal character would genuinely speak more correctly than the people around them.

    Break it when authenticity requires it; when the dialogue needs to sound like an actual person and not a stand-in for one.

    Break it when the rule itself is a leftover, a Latin-shaped prohibition, or an eighteenth-century preference with no functional reason for existing in English fiction written now.

    The difference between authentic rule-breaking and sloppy writing isn’t whether the rule was followed. It’s whether the choice was made on purpose.

    Authentic rule-breaking (the best kind, hands down) is consistent with a voice already established, serves the rhythm or the clarity of the moment, and shows up constantly in published books in the genre. Sloppy writing just drifts. The voice shifts without reason from one page to the next, and if you ask the writer why they made a particular choice, they don’t have an answer, because there wasn’t one.

    Read any suspect part, whether dialogue or narrative, out loud. If it sounds like a script being performed instead of a person talking, the grammar has gotten in the way of the story it’s supposed to help tell.

    An Editor’s Role

    The critique partner from the opening didn’t do anything unusual; they just did more than what they needed to. Highlighting every fragment and flagging initial prepositions is proofing for correctness, and correctness was never the question or ultimate goal. It’s always whether the sentence is doing what the story needs it to.

    A professional (human) editor starts with this question and doesn’t stop at asking it. When a manuscript comes across my desk, I have to decide, sentence by sentence in a line or copyedit, whether something is a slip the author didn’t notice or a choice they made on purpose—a working-class character’s double negative, a sentence that leaves out a comma because the moment is fast and tense, a fragment doing important work a full sentence couldn’t. If it’s intentional or serves the scene and story, my job isn’t to correct it. It’s my task to understand the context and see the author’s vision.

    But leaving it silently unflagged creates a different problem several steps down the line. A manuscript typically passes through more than one set of hands: a developmental edit, a copyedit, a proofread, sometimes more than one proofreader if it’s with a publisher. Someone reading that manuscript without the context I had when I made the call sees a comma splice or a sentence starting with “And” and has no way of knowing whether it’s intentional or a miss that made it through the last pass. Proofreaders, in particular, are trained to catch exactly these things, because many times, they are misses.

    That’s what a style sheet is for. Every intentional pattern or nuance gets documented as it’s decided, not left for the next person (or me again in a few months) to guess at.

    This character’s sections run in fragments during moments of panic, not to be changed.

    This dialect includes consistent double negatives, STET.

    Dialogue and narrative situations where it feels more natural can use the informal subjunctive (I wish I was taller versus I wish I were taller).

    It’s where every deliberate break from style guide convention gets its reasoning explained, so the next editor down the line doesn’t have to relitigate the decision, or worse, undo it.

    That’s one of the big differences between what happened at the top of this piece and what a professional edit does. Not the red text versus no red text. Instead, it’s the willingness to ask why a sentence looks the way it does, decide on purpose, and leave a record for whoever reads next.

    Grammar is another tool in the writer’s toolkit. It was never the main focus. The focus is a character or a narrator who sounds like someone specific, with a voice consistent enough to trust and alive enough to feel like it belongs to a person and not a one-room schoolhouse primer.

    Aime Sund is The Narrative Gardener—a fiction editor and horticulturist at Red Leaf Word Services, where she helps genre fiction authors cultivate stronger stories through her Narrative Ecology™ framework. www.redleafwords.com

  • Root-Bound Stories

    A matter of ratio, not prose.

    close-up photo of a root-bound plant resting on a pink pot.
    Root-bound and ready to plant!

    Fictional worlds take time and energy to build, and for some (like me) creating in this manner fuels the fire within. In no time at all, ten thousand years of history exists on the screen, and the protag’s genealogy is mapped eight generations back. The magic system has internal logic that would survive peer review. Individual cultures have their own cuisine, their own lunar rites, their own slang. A new calendar system is in place, certain regions produce certain crops, and specific families have specific abilities, but there are always wildcards (true story).

    Readers all say the worldbuilding is impressive.

    They also say they’re having trouble getting into the world. Or worse, they get into the world just fine and still don’t care what happens to the people in it. This is an often-encountered situation, one I can draw a direct parallel with in horticulture: the condition of a plant being root-bound.

    What “Root-Bound” Means

    When a plant stays too long in a container, or when it’s never transplanted at all, the roots run out of room to expand outward. So they circle. They layer. They grow back into and over themselves, filling every available inch of the pot with root mass so dense there’s barely any soil left.

    From the outside, the plant may look fine. It leafs out, takes up water, it survives. But it doesn’t thrive. Growth is stunted and yellowish. Flowering is sparse or doesn’t happen at all. In an effort to find more nutrients, the plant pours energy into its root system, which becomes an increasingly elaborate underground architecture, while the visible structure above the soil stays thin.

    The roots aren’t the problem, though. Roots are necessary. A plant with no root system dies immediately. The problem is ratio: when roots fill every inch of the container, there’s no growing medium left to hold water and nutrients. At a glance, the plant can still look fine, the way a great blurb, a phenomenal cover, intriguing About copy can look fine. Underneath, it’s suffocating on its own overgrowth.

    A root-bound story works the same way. The worldbuilding is extraordinary—years of work, sometimes, building the history, geography, culture, magic, economics, and religion the story will root in. The architecture is vast, detailed, internally consistent. And then the story itself struggles to grow.

    This is root-bound.

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    How to Recognize It

    The signals show up in feedback first, usually. Impressive is the word that should give you pause—impressive worldbuilding, impressive detail, impressive scope. Impressive, by nature of the word, is admiring something from a slight distance, though. It’s not the same as immersed, or invested, or I couldn’t put it down.

    Readers may say the worldbuilding is overwhelming. Not that it’s too much worldbuilding in an abstract sense, but too much arriving before they have a reason to care about it. The information is present; the hook for why it matters and why the reader should care isn’t.

    Characters can feel thin despite their elaborate setting. This one feels counterintuitive because the writer has often done significant character work, detailed their backstory, and provided clear motivation. But the characters are competing for page space with the world itself, and in a root-bound manuscript, the world is winning. Readers spend so much cognitive energy processing setting, history, and systems that character has to work harder than it should to register.

    Plot is episodic. The story moves from location to location, culture to culture, set piece to set piece—each one an opportunity to reveal more of the world. But the throughline is the world itself, not the character’s want or need or transformation. Readers follow the tour. They don’t feel the pull.

    The first fifty pages are heavy. This is where root-bound manuscripts are most tangible. The writer knows that readers need context to understand what’s happening, so they provide it— upfront, thoroughly, before the story has generated enough momentum to carry the weight. By the time the actual story begins, some readers have already let go.

    And there’s a subtler signal, one the writer might recognize in themselves before any reader names it: the scenes that feel most alive to write are the ones that reveal the world. The magic system clicking into place. The cultural detail unfolding. The history surfacing through dialogue in an old library. Writing the character moments feels harder, less satisfying, more like obligation. That preference is useful information for diagnosis.

    Not the Same as World-as-Character

    There is an important distinction to make about certain world-centered stories, however.

    Some stories have the world functioning as a character in its own right. Gothic fiction, cozy fantasy, and plenty of science fiction novels, to name but a few, are built that way on purpose—an academy house with its own rules, a village whose seasons shape the plot as much as any person does, a ship or station whose systems create real stakes—those aren’t root-bound. Those worlds are doing narrative work the story assigned to them, and the human characters are written to share the stage rather than dominate.

    Root-bound is different. It’s not the world claiming a character’s role. It’s the world crowding out the space where a character role needs to exist and yet doesn’t.

    Why This Happens

    Often the story idea itself is the size of a shelf of books, and the writer tries to grow it in the space allotted for a few volumes.

    This isn’t a failure of discipline or that the writer refuses to hold anything back. Many root-bound writers have already cut, trimmed, and simplified considerably from what originally lived in their heads. The world may genuinely have enough material to sustain something much longer than this: enough history, enough incident, enough scope for a trilogy or more. But the story living on top of that world—this cast, this plot—doesn’t have equivalent depth. The plot and character development runs thin at half the length, so the page count fills with world instead. The writer isn’t hiding the story; there isn’t enough story yet to hide. The world was conceived as an ecosystem. The story was conceived as a single season within it, and the season isn’t long enough to need everything the ecosystem contains.

    **Sidenote: I’ll admit this one hits close to home. I’m sitting on a fantasy world I can see completely, clearly big enough to outlast the story I’ve actually got, so I’m stalled. See, it even happens to editors when they can name the problem. Advice, anyone?…

    What Root-Bound Is Not

    It is not a story where the writer needs to reveal less, though that is an actual issue and a different one, with its own conversation. Root-bound is not about a writer who built the right-sized world and mishandled the reveal.

    Root-bound is a writer who built a world sized for something larger than the story currently in front of them and hasn’t yet decided which direction to resolve that mismatch: grow the container or right-size the contents.

    Growing the container might mean the standalone becomes a duology. It might mean the novel was always a series pretending to be one book. Right-sizing the contents might mean the eight-generation genealogy is real and rich and simply doesn’t belong to this story. It belongs to the next one, or the one after that, or a page in the world bible the reader never needs to see.

    Neither direction is a failure. Both are decisions the writer must consider. What doesn’t work is refusing to make either one, trying to keep the full-scale world and the single book container at the same time. The mismatch lives in the fundamental agreement between what the world requires and what the story promised to deliver, not in any sentence-level revisions.

    What Root-Bound Feels Like From the Inside

    If you’re writing a root-bound story, you probably already know something is off. The feedback has been consistent enough to stop feeling like reader error. Revisions to-date haven’t fixed it. You’ve tightened the prose, trimmed the exposition, added a faster opening… and the fundamental problem persists.

    That persistence is the tell.

    Here’s what makes root-bound manuscripts hard to diagnose from the inside: the world is real; it’s unique and excellent, and admitting it might be the problem feels like admitting years of work were wrong. They weren’t. But that fear is exactly why so much root-bound revision stays at the sentence-level—tightening prose is safe. Questioning whether the world itself needs to shrink, or the story needs to grow to meet it, means being willing to treat your own favorite thing as a variable instead of a fixed point. That’s a harder kind of objectivity than craft skill alone provides.

    The roots are still there. The canopy is still in place. Only real objectivity about the current ratio, not more polish, can show what actually needs to shift.

    Root-bound manuscripts need a different kind of revision than most writers expect—not line-level, and not structural in the conventional sense, but ecological. A Story Ecosystem Assessment™ maps the current balance of elements in your manuscript to identify where energy is stalling and what the visible story needs to grow. If your worldbuilding is impressive and your story still isn’t connecting, that’s worth looking at closely.

    Aime Sund is The Narrative Gardener—a fiction editor and horticulturist at Red Leaf Word Services, where she helps genre fiction authors grow stronger stories through her Narrative Ecology™ framework.

  • Blog Takeover! Help, I’ve Been Hijacked by The Conflict Thesaurus!

    Heads up, Writers! The Conflict Thesaurus Is Here!

    Writers, Can You Survive Danger & Death in the Conflict Challenge?

    I don’t know about you, but I get a little excited when a new writing guide comes along. Today I get to spill the news that The Conflict Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggles (Vol. 1) has hit the shelves.

    This guide is about that killer ingredient our stories need: Conflict. It shows you exactly how to use conflict to raise tension, create a fresh story premise, and pull readers in. The guide also dives into over 100 conflict scenarios and how each can be endlessly adapted to challenge a character inside and out. Problems, Moral Dilemmas, Ticking Clocks, Obstacles, No-Win Scenarios…this book is plot brainstorming in overdrive!

    I’m part of Angela & Becca’s Street Team for this release, and we have an important question to ask you:

    Can You Survive Danger as Well as Your Favorite Protagonist?

    Sure, it’s easy for you to use conflict to torture your characters and make them struggle, but what if it’s you in the hot seat instead? Will you make good decisions, or bad ones?

    It’s time to find out by taking the Conflict Challenge! I dare you to become the protagonist in a special story Angela & Becca have created. And heads up, if you survive, you win some pretty cool stuff!

    GIVEAWAY ALERT!

    While you’re at Writers Helping Writers taking the Conflict Challenge, make sure to enter The Conflict Thesaurus celebratory giveaway, too. But hurry – it’s only on for a few days.

    So, take the challenge…if you dare. And don’t forget to come back and let me know how you did against Camp Deadwood!

    If you’d like to find out more about how The Conflict Thesaurus can help your character construction and story, these spectacular writers have put together some posts about conflict and its importance. Check them out with these links:

    You can find links to purchase The Conflict Thesaurus and any of the other Writers Helping Writers thesauruses here: https://writershelpingwriters.net/bookstore/ . Get yours TODAY! Your characters will thank you!

    See you soon!

  • ISWG September blog post — How Do You Define Success as a Writer?

    Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!
    Posting: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer – aim for a dozen new people each time – and return comments. This group is all about connecting!

    *https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/

     Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.   

     You ready?
    Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!

    September 1 question – How do you define success as a writer? Is it holding your book in your hand? Having a short story published? Making a certain amount of income from your writing?

    The awesome co-hosts for the September 1 posting of the IWSG are Rebecca Douglass, T. Powell Coltrin @Journaling Woman, Natalie Aguirre, Karen Lynn, and C. Lee McKenzie!

    *Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay 

    At this time in my life, my writing is a sideline venture; one I pursue because I want to. I’m not expecting it to float me financially, at any point, and any monetary gain I might make from it is a bonus—another revenue stream.

    And because the time I have to write is sporadic. Building and running my freelance editing business is my main focus, as it should be. But writing my own book dovetails nicely with it.

    I often think about this topic after I have finished reading or listening to a book. I do review books on Goodreads, Amazon, NetGalley, and occasionally here, which requires an evaluation of sorts. The first question I ask myself is: Was I entertained by this book?

    Rarely do I answer no, because I wouldn’t have gotten that far if I didn’t find it entertaining. For me, then, that author was successful. They entertained me with their story and writing, fulfilling one of the most basic tenets of storytelling.

    *Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay 

    Books are my go-to time fill. I like my reading or audiobooks to take me to places and times I can’t go to on this physical plane. Or for non-fiction, to leave me with a lasting nugget of information I take and use to improve my life or career.

    Success for me is about making an impression that lasts. Whether it is with my gardens and plants, my editing, or my writing, I will feel successful if I make an impression on others that lasts. If my clients contact me again when they need an edit, or a reader recalls the blog post about the alternate land of Huphaea at a future date when my book is out, I will have been successful.

    *Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay 

    ©2021 Red Leaf Word Services. All Rights Reserved.

  • Character Discussions — 8 Steps to Side Characters by Sacha Black & “The Walking Stick” by Donald Maass @Writer Unboxed

    Hard on the heels of finishing Sacha Black’s newest masterpiece 8 Steps To Side Characters, this article, “The Walking Stick” , appeared in my inbox. Sacha’s book left my mind reeling, digesting much of what I knew stated in a different way that added clarification and inspiration. Then I read Mr. Maass’s no-punches-pulled airing on the idea of ‘authentic’ characters and what authenticity really means.

    Yep, mind-blown. 🤯

    To keep your characters from falling flat, starting flat, or feeling flat, I highly recommend these two resources. Happy writing!~

    Solid side character instruction with a slathering of singularly-Sacha humor. I recommend it highly!

    The Walking Stick

    August 4, 2021 By Donald Maass Leave a Comment

    There’s a concept in storytelling that I’ve long tried to understand: “authentic”.  Mostly it’s invoked with respect to characters.  It’s important to know them.  It’s important that they act and speak in ways consistent with who they are, whether entering a room or rocketing to the stars.  It’s also important to know how they came to be who they are.  Back story wounds and burdens shape and define them and become the engines of change.

    If writing is “authentic” then every gesture, action and utterance is “honest” and everything observed is rendered in a way both original and pinpoint accurate. “Authentic” means writing not to formula but as characters would actually behave, whatever the circumstances.  “Authentic” means they go about their business in their own ways, not the author’s.  Even when they are inspired by real people or reflect the author’s own experience, if characters are “authentic” then a story will always have internal logic and integrity.

    It’s something like that.

    What bothers me is, how does knowing characters and honoring their independent existence help you to write a story?  I mean, it’s nice if characters behave in ways that are lifelike—or which at least conforms to our understandings of them—then, so far, they can only display who they are.  A backstory-induced need is a good thing and can propel a character toward some sort of emotional resolution, but by doing what?  On top of that, when characters are strongly defined and consistent how can they surprise us? read more…

  • Reblog — Can Writers Still Be Readers? — Writer Unboxed

    This is a topic that comes up often in conversation among writers, and more importantly, among editors. Many who say they do all three activities grouse about how one has ruined some of the others for them. Perhaps I’m in a minority, but I haven’t had this happen. Yet.

    It may be that my brain works in a different way, one that segments and separates easier than someone else. I have high Input, Strategic, and Learner Gallup Strengths, information intake is my specialty. It stands to reason that sorting it would be also. I can file away that poignant metaphor or plot twist for later musing and not let it dampen the story or ruin it.

    Either way, I find it a fascinating topic that is as individual as the person expressing it. Here’s another opinion from Writer Unboxed.

    What do you think? Does writing and/or editing affect your reading?~

    image by Paul Bence

    All writers begin as readers, right? We fell in love with other people’s stories—where they could take us, what they could do—and then, one day, decided to make a story ourselves. 546 more words

    Can Writers Still Be Readers? — Writer Unboxed

  • Insecure Writers Support Group July Post

    The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer – aim for a dozen new people each time – and return comments. This group is all about connecting!

    Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!

    Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

    July’s question is: What would make you quit writing?

    I can answer this in one word:

    Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay 

    TIME.

    Writing has become part of the package of the life I’ve built, but it isn’t what sustains or supports me. It is something I want to do and that I have recently found satisfaction in.

    I’ve always known I needed a creative outlet, but it was an aspect that I ignored or boxed up to be let out ‘later’. I was far too busy for writing, I didn’t feel I had anything to write, and I preferred to read in my free time.

    I also had landscape designing as my creative outlet. A few birds with one stone there, so to speak.

    Since garden design is at a minimum now, I have searched for other ways to be creative. I can’t draw, I’m not musically inclined in the slightest, and poetry is ok, but I’m not often inspired in that manner.

    Once I decided to write my own novel and stories, it has all come down to TIME.

    It is a huge challenge to get in words when I can, in between gardening, living with three active dogs, house stuff, farm activities, and last but not least, starting and managing an editing business. So far, I get them in when I can, and I’m happy with that.

    What tends to happen is if I get ‘into story’ then I stay there until that piece is written and let other things lag, like my blog.

    Because I can only do so much.

    Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay 

    I’m putting my faith in the tortoise of the proverb, content that ‘slow and steady’ will get the book, story, alternate world written. When the muse whips me along, I go with it as much as I can.

    Writing is the thing that I can put aside and pick up later, and it uses more energy than reading, so it takes some preparation during the day. Time is certainly the deciding factor.

    If I write, it’s because I have the muse and the time. If I don’t write, it’s because I don’t have the time.

    And now that I’ve started, if I stop, it will most certainly be a matter of something else requiring that time.~

    Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

  • Reblog — Thinking Fiction: The Book as an Object — An American Editor

    This topic caught my eye while I was scrolling. I enjoyed the discussion about the phases a manuscript goes through as it passes to different people on the publishing journey. We all believe our writing to be a part of us, but isn’t the idea that it becomes “real” only once someone else has read it a bit ironic? The section about the author-editor relationship and how an editor views a book is informative—something to be kept in mind when you send your work out. Well worth reading for writers and editors, enjoy!~

    Carolyn Haley Writing a novel has often been likened to having a baby. The analogy is apt, in terms of gestation, obsession, pain, thrill, frustration, and all that goes with the long-term development of a new life. Less often discussed is what happens later in the process, when it’s time to push the fledgling out […]

    Thinking Fiction: The Book as an Object — An American Editor

  • Nyssa’s Nuggets

    “Start the day with something you love.”

    Nyssa has two favorite times of the day—walk times and feeding times, both of which occur twice daily. Isn’t she lucky?

    Since she was old enough, I have taken her for a walk first thing in the morning. Many people say it helps a dog merge into the day easier if they go out to “patrol” their surroundings first. It seems to work fairly well in the 25 years I have been doing it with seven different dogs.

    We speed-walk three-quarters of a mile down the street because she can’t wait to get to the furthest point away from the house that I will go. Then we amble back, or rather I tow her back. She truly loves her walks, no matter when they happen.

    When we return, she has her food and then settles in to perhaps play a little, but certainly nap the morning away. All is good.

    I find the early morning walks energizing as well. It helps to set the tone of the day, or bring to my attention what my tone is so I can correct it, if need be. It gets my muscles moving and my brain working. I rarely have any sleep fog lingering after the first couple of minutes down the road.

    It also gives me the opportunity to witness some truly amazing celestial moments and gorgeous sunrises. Because the traffic gets busy very early around here, we are always walking in the hour or so just before dawn.

    The quiet is perfect for a morning mind-sort.

    So though at times I rail against morning walks in my mind, (think winter and rain), I do enjoy them.

    The open promise of what the day can become is so tangible in those hours before dawn. Starting the day this way has been part of half my life now, so it must be something good.

    It gives you more of an opportunity to enter the editing day with a sunny outlook.

    Or if you write, getting your own words down first can make the difference between finishing your book and not. You are, after all, your number one customer, right?

    Put yourself first and do something that makes you feel good before sitting down to better someone else’s work. Mindset is everything.

    Do you start the day with something that makes you feel good, feel strong, feel positive? Try a walk one warm morning, and I guarantee you will feel uplifted the moment the birds start singing while the sky changes color in burgeoning silence. Or get that next paragraph written, or master that yoga stretch. A few little endorphins patrolling around your brain and you will be ready to take on that block of text you gave up on last night.

    Shake off the sleep, wake the muscles, drop off the dregs of yesterday, and walk home with a spring in your step and your tail curled high on your back. Like Nyssa does. Akitas do know best.

    Have a great week! Woof woof roooooo!~ 🐕‍🦺

    What is your morning routine, does it start with something that makes you feel good? If not, would you like it to? Let me know in the comments below 👇🏼, maybe we can help each other better our mornings.😊

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    You can find the checklist popup at www.redleafwords.com, or use this link here to sign up and get your copy! You may even get more of Nyssa in the newsletter too 😉.

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  • Reblog — 11 Techniques for Transforming Clichéd Phrasings — WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

    One of the editing tips I recently posted on my social media channels for Red Leaf Words Services had to do with rephrasing clichés in your own unique way when you want to use the basic idea. This post from the informative ladies at Writers Helping Writers shows you how to do just that. Your readers will thank you!~

    One of the things that pumps me up the most when I’m reading a book is when the author phrases things in a way I’ve never seen before. It could be a familiar concept or image—red hair, an urban street, fear—but when it’s written differently, I’m able to visualize that thing in a new way,…

    11 Techniques for Transforming Clichéd Phrasings — WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®