yourpassions.tk

For years I've been suggesting that people record themselves reading their own stories. That's something I also kept meaning to do. Today that changed. I recorded a short story, Things That Go Rattle In the Night. You can hear it by clicking here . (This link opens the QuickTime player, which will play in the background if you right-click and open in a new tab or window.) For recording this story, I used Audacity, the universally recommended Open Source freeware product for making digital voice recordings and doing simple edits. I found it straightforward and easy to use. When the story was recorded to my satisfaction, I exported it to the MP3 format. At 3.2 MB, the file compares favorably with the 28 MB of data in the Audacity file. Now that I have this file, I may save it in WAV format for burning to a standard CD disk. Or, considering the speed with which everyone is turning to MP3 players and iPods, I may leave it as it is. In either case, it's ready to share. If you w...

If you ever find yourself at a loss for words, get out your photo album. I just rediscovered this old photo. The picture itself is terrible in so many respects, but it set off an explosion of story ideas, as you'll see. The “ story ” in this picture is my third-grade Halloween costume. Mother made our costumes. I requested this one, and she did her usual great work to produce it. I could write more about other costumes. Other story ideas I find in this picture include: My huaraches — Mexican shoes woven of thin strips of leather. We bargained for these in a Juarez market, which triggers stories of trips to Juarez, bargaining, trading with the Indians, and shoes in general. My dad’s Groucho Marx glasses, with the huge nose. These illustrate his sense of humor, which brings all sorts of stories about him to mind. The curlers in my hair, used to contribute to the witch-effect. Those perforated metal curlers had a sort of clamp that held the hair ends in place against the barrel. The ...

As I promised in the last post , here are all the answers to show you how to punctuate any dialogue you may use in your stories. Since this topic tends become muddled without illustrations, I marked up some illustrations, and I'll let them speak for themselves. This first example shows the most common way to state dialogue. You identify the speaker (explanatory text), then write the words that were said (dialogue). Now and then you can reverse the order to give variety to your story. Another way to add variety is to put the explanatory text in the middle of the dialogue. Things become more complex when you quote somebody who is telling you what a third person said. This involves two sets of quotation marks, standard double ones, with single ones inside. In British usage, these two quotation mark customs are reversed. In Britain, single quotations marks are standard for general use, and double ones are used for the inside quotation. Little changes when the quotation is a question or...

The best way to breathe life into your stories is to include a few lines of dialogue. Friends and relatives play a significant part in many of your stories, and the best way to make these people come alive and seem real is to let them speak for themselves. For example, take this bit of dialogue I lifted from one of my own stories about an adventure my sister and I had when we were quite young: We screamed so loud that Mother and GranRene flew out the door like someone had shot them out of a gun. They probably broke the record for the twenty-yard dash, running over to that tree. “What’s wrong?!” “There’s a snake.” “Where?” “Over there!” We excitedly pointed across the yard to the spot near the house where the snake was making its get-away. GranRene ran over near it and looked. “It’s just a bull snake. Bull snakes aren’t poisonous. They eat mice, and they’re good to have around.” “Don’t you ever scream that way again unless you’re really in danger!” scolded Mother. She looked pale, and ...

Oh wow! To my horror I just learned that the link in my previous post to Pat Holt’s list of Ten Mistakes should have carried a warning: I learned this from a friend who is on her maiden writing voyage. “After I read that list, I realized there are so many things to be careful about, I’m having trouble writing anything!” she balefully admitted. The hair on the back of my neck went on full alert. “Those rules are for editing , not writing drafts!” I told her. “Just write! Write anything. Just get words on paper!” I felt like standing on my chair and yelling, " Forget the rules! She still sounded a little stuck and frozen so I made another suggestion: “Sit down with a tape recorder and tell a short story to the recorder. Then transcribe the tape.” This idea appealed to her, and she promised to go home and give it a try. The idea behind this advice is that transferring her own words from audio to the written page will get her used to writing in a conversational tone. She agreed to p...

If you take your writing at all seriously, check out Pat Holt’s list of Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See 1. Repeats 2. Flat Writing 3. Empty Adverbs 4. Phony Dialogue 5. No-good Suffixes 6. The “To Be” Words 7. Lists 8. Show, Don’t Tell 9. Awkward Phrasing 10. Commas The list doesn’t tell you how to structure your story flow to increase suspense, entertain readers, or bring tears to their eyes. It doesn’t tell you how to crop your story to focus it. But heeding the advice on it will help you bring your words to life and keep readers interested. Pat earned her spurs as a writing critic as an editor at Houghton Mifflin and the San Francisco Book Company. Later she was book editor and critic at The San Francisco Chronicle . Currently she is an advocate for independent bookstores and consults on manuscript development. The lady knows the business, and she knows writing. Write on, Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

How often do you write a life story that has more than one subject? What? It never occurred to you to consolidate topics? Welcome to the vast majority! Few people do. It’s natural to follow the ratio of one topic : one story. Not only is it natural, but when you read books on the subject, the planning chapters always have you make lists of story topics, and none of them (as far as I recall) discuss the option of doubling up. There are several ways of doing this. One is nesting, where stories are imbedded, one within another, like a set of Russian nesting dolls. This technique requires that you return to complete each successive layer in reverse order to bring the overall story to closure. Another way is to segue from one related story to the next, with a couple of lines of transition between. One of the most interesting is to string small stories together along an ongoing thread story. Lori Jakiela uses this latter approach in Miss New York Has Everything , her recent memoir of growing...

After two recent posts on finding the perfect words you may be feeling discouraged. I hear you thinking, “That’s so much work!” Indeed it is. I happen to enjoy editing and rewording. It’s one of my favorite sports — up to a point. Then, well, I get bored. I get tired. I get other ideas and want to move on. That happens sooner on some pieces than others. Novelist Karen Hancock addressed this condition with a quote in her blog : “This is where I have to start applying that Tom Clancy quote about good enough being good enough, whereas perfect is a total pain and often not worth the trouble anyway.” Well said, Karen. What more could I add? Write on, Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

A few days ago in Transcending the Trite , I described ways of finding alternate words to keep your writing from sounding repetitious and stale. This sort of word puzzle is an exceptionally good workout for your brain . It keeps your neurons healthy and actually builds new connections, helping to keep your mind young and flexible. Here’s another example to encourage you to try it yourself. Let’s click over to Thesaurus.com to find a synonym for “master” to reduce redundancy in this sentence: “Cindy was a master of creativity and the announcement she wrote was a masterpiece.” Oh dear — that’s okay for a first draft, to get the idea down on paper, but all I’m saying here is that Cindy wrote a masterpiece. If I want to leave that descriptive phrase in, I need to change it so it adds value to the message to justify the added ink. I find pro, expert, whiz, wizard and exemplar, among others, but they don’t quite fit. Champion is close, but my favorite is crackerjack — that’s my word. Not on...

Some of our most profound stories are short, and they beg to be rendered graphically, as this one does. This story is pared down to its essence. Further detail would distract from the knowingness of it. My memory is much richer: I remember the sleeveless mini-dress I wore – a yellow coarse-weave fabric with a paisley pattern of pale golds and oranges, a wide collar and buttons down the front. I loved that dress, and wore it with my hippy sandals. I felt so cool in my hip short hairdo with the curls on top and sleek, smooth hair on the bottom. My sunglasses were huge. I remember the smell of heat waves rising from asphalt and the fly buzzing lazily in the air. My bag of groceries weighed heavy and cold in my left arm and my tiny son’s little hand, as plump as his pudgy cheeks, warmed my other. He stood smiling in his navy chino boxer shorts, the madras plaid shirt matching the one I made his daddy, and his red Keds. The black vinyl top on our red Corvair Corsa convertible radiated heat ...

If you’re even a little bit serious about improving your writing, you know the value of replacing banal autopilot words with something more imaginative, something that will catch the reader’s eye rather than gliding past it like asphalt on the road. But how do you go about finding those fragrant figments of speech? It takes years to develop enough vocabulary flexibility to have a dozen options on the tip of your fingers for any given phrase. This morning I began an e-mail to another writer. “I love your descriptions,” I wrote. Oh gag! I thought. Not about the descriptions, but about that trite phrase. I’m writing about lilting phrases that slide into my ear like the warble of a meadowlark, and all I can say is “I love your descriptions”? I tried again. “I admire your descriptions.” True, but not even close. There was no need to flounder. Those of you reading this blog can do the same thing I did — click over to Thesaurus.com . I searched for alternatives to “admire” and came up with tw...