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I’m lucky that Vancouver Island hasn’t been hit by the heat wave and heat dome that are covering the Eastern US and Canada. My empathy to all of you who are under that scorching heat!
In true ADHD form, I drafted this post back in March and forgot to schedule it. And now I have yet another article to share.
My Writer’s Digest debut
I’m thrilled to share that my first article for Writer’s Digest is out now, in the July/August issue with Steven Rowley on the cover (an apt choice for Pride Month 🏳️🌈). My article, “In Search of Lost Memories: How Nature Can Help Memoirists Remember” is in the “On Nonfiction” column. I’m including a snippet below to give you a taste, though because it’s in the print issue, I can’t share the whole thing. (If it ever winds up online, I definitely will share the link!)
For more than a decade, I’ve experienced the power of nature to boost my inner peace and creativity. For this article, I wove together three areas of neuroscience research to support my experience; it was exciting to see that everything I’ve noticed anecdotally has research behind it!
Even if you’re not a memoirist, you can use the exercises I outline in the column. Formulate a question about your WIP and go into nature. Try these practices, and see what comes up (feel free to share in the comments).
I’m also excited about my article in the next issue (September/October), on how to mine everyday events to create wonder on the page. Stay tuned!
Beyond BICHOK for Jane Friedman
This is going back about six months, but it weaves together my interest in mindfulness and wholeness with the writing process: “Beyond BICHOK: How, When and Why Getting Your Butt Out of the Chair Can Make You a Better Writer.” Here’s a taste:
For decades, writers have been told the most important thing to do is to put “butt in chair, hands on keyboard.” As acronyms emerged with USENET forums in the 1990s, this became abbreviated “BICHOK.”
BICHOK is essential to writing. You can’t publish a book without sitting down to write, to revise, to revise again (and again and again), to query, or to fill out your author questionnaire. Yet so often, it’s treated like a Puritan work ethic or a punishment: “You put your backside in that chair, young man, and don’t get up until you’ve written 10 pages.”
That may work for some writers, and if you’re among them, more power to you! That kind of disciplinarian approach, though, doesn’t work for me.
Putting hands on a keyboard doesn’t make someone a writer, any more than holding a Stratocaster makes someone a musician. There are many times when we can gain insight by looking away from our work. These include: Before we sit down to write, during the writing process, and between revisions. What we do during those times is every bit as important as getting the words down.
To read the rest of the post, click here.
How to Use Modifiers Skillfully for Brevity Blog
Then in March—which suddenly feels like yesterday, but much cooler—I shared my favorite insight about modifiers at the Brevity Blog. To the best of my knowledge, no other writing teacher has identified this specific approach to much-maligned adjectives and adverbs. Here’s the intro:
Readers don’t like being told what to think, feel or perceive. They want to have an experience, and our job is to use words that facilitate that experience. We all experience the world—including books and stories—through the filters of our own experience and conditioning, so it requires skill and practice to evoke the response we’re going for, whether that’s compassion for your protagonist, fear at their predicament, or swooning over a meet-cute.
Adjectives and adverbs are the junk food of writing; an abundance of them is a sign that we haven’t spent the necessary time selecting verbs or nouns. For the most part, if we’ve chosen a strong noun, an adjective is redundant. The same goes for adverbs and verbs.
This isn’t an indictment! Adjectives and adverbs are not universally “bad,” but they can weaken the impact of strong writing. And each of those modifiers comes in two types, one more useful to writers than the other.
Again, although Brevity is geared towards nonfiction, the same principles apply for fiction writers. To read more and to learn how to navigate these literary landmines skillfully, click here.
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Thank you for a great read. Loved the Brevity Blog. So helpful.