Seven Simple Ways to Make Your Writing Rock

Make your writing rock with these seven simple techniques, perfect for the beginning writer!

Make Your Writing Rock with Powerful Verbs

Strong verbs are a core asset that belong in every writer’s toolbox, and they can make the difference between a ho-hum piece of writing and something that is much more engaging. Take a look at this: 

 Mary walked down the street. -or- Mary strutted down the street. -or- Mary traipsed down the street.

Just that one word gives a whole different tone to the sentence and engages the reader on a higher level. 

Fear not, you don’t have to spend minutes each writing session, thesaurus in hand, seeking the perfect verb for each sentence. In fact, I suggest that you do not do that. Just write, and use whatever the wording is that comes most naturally. Making each word perfect (or as close to perfection as is possible for a mere mortal), that comes in the editing stage.

Personally, when I am editing my own work I look for the ‘to be’ words. You remember those from grade school, don’t you? Here’s a refresher for all of you who have done their best to banish those old school days from their minds: -be, am, is, are, was, were, being, and been. I look for those and do my very best to eradicate them. 

Sometimes the word belongs and is the best one for the situation, but a whole page of nothing but ‘to be’ is a little dull. Liven up your prose wherever you can with descriptive, life giving verbs that call up a picture in the reader’s mind of exactly the thing you are trying to convey.

Make Your Writing Rock with Active Language

Taking the ‘to be’ forms out of your writing will go a long way toward making your language sound alive and invigorating to the reader, but you still should be aware of passive constructions. In order for your fiction to be active, please ensure that in every single sentence the subject is committing the action.

More grade school stuff here, sorry.

Here is our sentence: ‘John tossed the ball.”

John is the subject, ball is the object, and of course – tossed is the verb.

If you were to write: ‘the ball was tossed by John’, that is passive.

There may be a rare time and place that the passive voice is desirable, but I would strongly advise that beginning writers stick with the active voice 100% of the time. Make it a habit. Ingrain it into your psyche like a cattle brand. 

The active voice engages your reader and brings the story actions alive.

Show – Don’t Tell to Make Your Writing Rock

When I began writing, this phrase confused me for some time. What is showing? How do you show? What is telling? How do I not do that?

Those days predated the internet, and I could not find resources that could tell me the answers. Still every writing teacher said ‘show, don’t tell’, along with every writing magazine and the few writing books I could lay my hands on.

You are blessed, because I’m here to let you know what telling is, how to show things, and the difference between the two.

Telling: John was angry that night.

Showing: John stomped into the house after work, slammed his toolbox down, and turned to stare at his wife with a scowl.

The simplest way of explaining the difference between showing and telling is to say that showing involves concrete, descriptive details.

Telling is boring. Showing can be electric – it draws a reader into the tale and is one of the tools that can turn an anecdote into a full blown story that others may like to read.

So…please…show…don’t tell.

Stagger Sentence Length to Make Your Writing Rock

Paragraphs with sentences in similar lengths can be dull. A writer can spice up their writing by varying the number of words in a sentence. Long sentences, short sentences, they all work together. Similar length sentences all together can be hypnotic. It’s like a fly in your house droning on and on in your ear. 

-or-

Spice up your writing by varying sentence length. Short sentences rock. Long sentences can draw someone in, drawing out detail after detail, giving life to gorgeous language along the way. To heck with what your teachers said about run-ons. Long sentences can be wondrous. Putting long and short sentences together is awesome, and can bring on a different type of hypnosis referred to as the fictive dream, not the sort of hypnosis that makes you want to swat a fly.

See the two paragraphs above? Yes, the content varied, but do you notice the differences in sentence lengths? Which paragraph was more interesting to read?

Be Concise

I learned this via a writing exercise in grad school. I didn’t like it, it wasn’t fun, and I hated doing it. But it did improve my writing.

Here’s how it goes. Write something, it doesn’t matter what. Pen story from your childhood, or from the last time you saw people arguing publicly, or a fairy tale about a princess and your postman. Really, write anything.

Now go through and remove all of the adverbs and adjectives, every last one. It will be painful. Read your story again and see how it changes the flow. You may find that you want to put some of the words back, and you can, but make sure that every adjective and adverb is needed and improves the overall story or the sound of the language. If you’re scratching your head right now, trying to remember what an adjective is and you need a refresher on the parts of speech, please email me at [email protected] and I will make a post on that subject.

Avoid Cliché to Make Your Writing Rock

I made this boo-boo myself up above, partially to illustrate and partially because I love writing in cliché. However, I don’t use cliche, not in a creative work that I’m producing for others to read.

When you use cliché you are committing three writing sins. 1 – You are stealing the creativity of the person who originally coined the cliché in question. 2 – You are hampering your own creativity by not finding a new way of saying an old thing. 3 – Worst of all, you are not giving your readers something fresh and original.

In case you can’t spot the cliché above, it was when I said ‘if you’re scratching your head’. I could have said ‘if you’re rummaging through your mental attic’, or even ‘if you’re stumped’. 

Clichés are sometimes tricky little buggers to weed out because we all use cliché so much that it’s almost second nature (oops, there’s another one). Strong writers will dig away at their prose and get them out of there.

I do think cliché is fine for a blog post, an email, or even sometimes in dialogue. Just use these overused phrases sparingly. Rules are made to be broken (another!), but you wouldn’t want overuse of cliché to destroy the work that you labored so hard over.

Beginning writers often have prose that is rife with overuse of simile and metaphor (in case you’re not familiar with the terms, we will have a post on that in the future). These two figurative techniques can add a good deal of style and oomph to what you have to say, but only when done well. Too much can make your story like a woman with too much makeup. Bad metaphors are the worst.

Here’s a quick reminder of which is which. 

Simile: Jane is like a cat.

Metaphor: Jane slinked into the living room and curled up on the sofa.

A few of these babies are awesome. Lots of them can make your writing cringe worthy.

So writers, that’s all I have for now. I wanted to make this inaugural post something meaty and of value so that you can get to work right away on creating something magnificent. I’ll leave you with a video that digs a little deeper on developing engaging writing until we meet again.

Come and join us at our Facebok group: Write Makes Might

Happy Writing!