Oh, look who we found! “Said the raven—wingardium leviosa!“
Happy Day One of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)!
Have you ever thought about writing a novel? November may be the month for you!
If you are new to NaNoWriMo and are curious about the project, here’s what the official NaNoWriMo page has to say about it:
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000-word (approximately 175-page) novel by 11:59:59 PM on November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.
In 2011, we had 256,618 participants and 36,843 of them crossed the 50K finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.
Getting involved in NaNoWriMo is easy, either as a writer or a supporter of the participants in your region. If you wish to be counted as a writer during this month, be sure to sign up and track your writing at the NaNoWriMo page. Though it is a U.S. National Novel Writing Month, writers from all over the world are allowed to participate. At least two of the Grammarly staff are going to be involved with NaNoWriMo; why not join us?
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
Suspense: 4 Tips for Putting More Tension into Your Writing
What a fun picture. Why is this photo so good? Mainly, it inspires a sense of tension and suspense about how the victim of the prank will react.
The element that makes this an engaging photo also makes writing engaging — suspense. Surely, one of the most important elements when considering a good piece of fiction is how tense or suspenseful it is. However, creating tension in writing can be challenging. Here are some quick tricks for adding suspense to your writing.
1) Ticking clocks and deadlines
When a character is on a tight deadline, the sense of urgency naturally adds tension. A story built around a character who has to rush to the other side of the country to find a doctor for his dying mother is much more engaging than a story built around a quest without any ticking clock. Consider the significant amount of tension in J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as compared to his previous work, The Hobbit. In the former, Frodo’s mission to destroy the dangerous ring creates an implied “ticking time-bomb” that keeps readers on the edge of their seats much more so than in The Hobbit.
2) Setting
Putting your character in a perilous situation with various challenges is another surefire way to create tension. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series is a great example. Harry is in extreme peril throughout the entire series, and he consistently confronts challenges that put him in increasingly difficult situations. The danger creates worry and curiosity in the reader. How will this situation be overcome? How will the character escape? The suspense keeps the reader engaged.
3) Thoughts
Talking the reader through the characters’ worrying thoughts, doubts, and feelings reinforces suspense because it becomes clear that the characters don’t know how they might make it out of the situations they are in. The element of unknowing keeps the audience hooked. Many successful authors use this technique to great effect. In The Hunger Games Series, Suzanne Collins used this technique to create suspense around the true nature of Katniss and Peeta’s relationship.
4) Change of perspective
This technique can be used two ways. First, it can be used to leave one plot line hanging, while you attend to another. The reader will be left wondering what is going to happen in the previous plot line. Second, it can be used to give the reader information that will heighten understanding of the true situation and can create anticipation or anxiety about whether or not the characters will discover the truth.
The photo above is a great example of how this can work. If we are following the progression of the story from only the man’s perspective, there is not much interesting until after the water has spilled on him. If we stop before the event and leave his perspective for another, either the boy’s or a neutral observer’s, we get some information and begin to wonder what will happen next. Will the man get mad? Will the boy get in trouble? Will the man figure out who did it? Leaving the reader hanging while you explore another plot line or give perspective on the character’s situation will keep your audience engaged.
There are several more techniques for adding tension into your writing. If you are looking for more tips, check out:
How to Write With Style by Kurt Vonnegut
Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.
These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful —- ? And on and on.
Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead —- or, worse, they will stop reading you.
The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.
So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.
1. Find a subject you care about
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way —- although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.
2. Do not ramble, though
I won’t ramble on about that.
3. Keep it simple
As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.
Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
4. Have guts to cut
It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
5. Sound like yourself
The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.
In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.
All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.
I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.
6. Say what you mean
I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable —- and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.
Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.
7. Pity the readers
They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school —- twelve long years.
So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify —- whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.
That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.
For really detailed advice
For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.
You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.
In Sum:
1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple
4. Have guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean
7. Pity the readers
from: How to Use the Power of the Printed Word, Doubleday
Article: Source
Image Source: Pamela Bliss’s mural on Massachusetts Avenue
Barnaby Conrad: On Writing
6 rules for writing a great story
1. Try to pick the most intriguing place in your piece to begin.
2. Try to create attention-grabbing images of a setting if that’s where you want to begin.
3. Raise the reader’s curiosity about what is happening or is going to happen in an action scene.
4. Describe a character so compellingly that we want to learn more about what happens to him or her.
5. Present a situation so vital to our protagonist that we must read on.
6. And most important, no matter what method you choose, start with something happening! (And not with ruminations. A character sitting in a cave or in jail or in a kitchen or in a car ruminating about the meaning of life and how he got to this point does not constitute something happening.)
Hone your opening words, for just as stories aren’t written but rewritten, so should beginnings be written and rewritten. Look at your opening and ask yourself, ‘If I were reading this, would I be intrigued enough to go on?’
And remember: Always aim for the heart!
Conrad is the author of The Complete Guide to Writing Fiction.
