Comments on: Give Yourself Permission To Be Bad

By: Portrait of a Writer…Interrupted » Word Count and Counting

Portrait of a Writer…Interrupted » Word Count and Counting — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 14:38:13 +0000

[...] Word Count and Counting I’m at 17,717 words on my cozy mystery which should end up being close to 70,000. I’m making slow progress, but at least it’s progress. I took the advice of Randy Ingermanson and allowed my self to be bad. [...]

By: Debra

Debra — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 09:26:27 +0000

Judith
You’re not dumb. I know of plenty of people who didn’t know what LOL meant, me being one of them. It means laugh out loud.

By: Debra

Debra — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 09:23:59 +0000

Thanks Ron for that advice. I will work at that and I’m sick of hearing about Paris um Hilton too.

By: Judith

Judith — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 04:53:57 +0000

I’m so dumb, I don’t even know what LOL means. Would you enlighten me, please?

By: Patrick Hudson

Patrick Hudson — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 03:47:26 +0000

Thanks you MLE. I have used Thesaurus.com, but only so often. It does help quite a bit. I agree with the one adjective per noun rule, I’m not sure if I have followed it…

By: ML Eqatin

ML Eqatin — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:03:35 +0000

Oops! That wasn’t and adjective, and that wasn’t a noun! But you get the drift.
Enjoy the ride! -MLE

By: ML Eqatin

ML Eqatin — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:01:01 +0000

Patrick,
I live by thesaurus.com. It’s at the top of my bookmarks. I started using this for the opposite reason from most: my normal vocabulary was way over the heads of the ESL people I was writing instruction manuals for. (And a lot of others, too). So I was always looking for simpler words, and often found more precise ones that were also uncomplicated.
Another tip gleaned from I don’t remember who: try not to use more than one adjective per noun; extras tone down the emphasis. If a character says, “It was really filthy,” that has less punch on the page than if he simply says, “It was filthy.”

By: Patrick Hudson

Patrick Hudson — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 16:46:27 +0000

I was just talking about poetry and about how I could never write it, so your comment is quite coincidental. I actually really like that idea, and it’s easy these days to find poetry around the internet or in a book collection. Your other idea would probably do me well too, I may do that when I begin editing where there is no fun anymore in writing (joke of course)
Thank you for the thoughts!

By: Carrie Neuman

Carrie Neuman — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 15:10:22 +0000

Patrick,

Try reading some poetry for a while. No one spends more time worrying about which word has just the right shade of meaning than a poet. They don’t have room to expand on what they’re trying to say.

My favorite editing trick might help you. Print out the scene you’re working on. Take a pencil and put a box around your nouns, a circle around the verbs, and cross out every adjective and adverb on the page.

Sometimes it’s easier to think of a stronger noun or verb if that’s all you’re looking at. Once they’re doing the heavy lifting for you, go back and put in the adverbs and adjectives you still need. Most of them you won’t since you already put in the noun or verb that included them.

By: Patrick Hudson

Patrick Hudson — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 05:51:50 +0000

In writing my first novel, I have found that expressing myself has been difficult. I know exactly what emotions I want to convey, most of my characters journeys, and the ideas have been flowing for months to a poin where I have almost the whole story locked away in my head. My problem has been choosing the correct vocabulary to precisely convey my point. I get frustrated and can sometimes sit for hours (hyperbole of course) typing and retyping what I think is the exact meaning of the passage. This is a great encouragement to let my ideas flow and then go back and massively edit.