Stop, look and listen before you use the verb to see.
Find yourself, but don’t say so
Use constructions like these sparingly: “She found herself shouting at him”; “Suddenly I found myself shopping in an X-rated video store.”
How does narrative die?
The death of narrative finds its roots in the optical culture of the twentieth century.
Warm-up exercise: Eyes shut
Close your eyes and freewrite one page.
Function shift
It isn't always a pretty sight when one part of speech gets turned into another.
Gerunds and participles: Avoid ING words
Phrases and clauses
They are different, and they have different uses.
Sentence fragments
Sometimes sentence fragments are OK.
Trump and trumpery
The word trump has begun to creep into daily news and conversation. Let's not help it along.
Sentences: Simple, fragment, run-on
A simple sentence is a whole sentence. A sentence fragment isn’t. A run-on sentence is not necessarily long.
Narrative exercise: Birthday
Write down an anecdote about your birthday (any birthday). An anecdote is a very short account, a wee story: it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and something happens for the narrator, or someone else in the story, or both.
Dialogue: Keep it simple
When writing dialogue, you don't have to keep changing the verb and adding stage business. That stuff only slows down the story. What the characters say is the strongest element, so stick with that and keep things moving.
Warm-up exercise: Lunch
Freewrite for 10 minutes about lunch—any lunch you had during the last week that sticks in your mind. Where were you? Who were you with? What did you eat, or not eat? What else was going on? Maybe you skipped lunch; write about that.
Morale exercise: Real writers
Write this down: “Real writers . . .” and freewrite from there for 10 minutes.
Issues—the word
At Geist, we’ve got issues with issues.
Lie, lay, laid, lain
The judge lay down for a nap, then she got up and laid down the law. Or did she?
