How to Write About Raw Emotion
Writers read, but they also listen. Every writer I know loves music as much as or more than they do reading. When I first started writing, I didn't compose blogs or novels or non-fiction books; I wrote songs. The poetry of all those beautiful words sung like pearls on...Ann Voskamp: Drop Your Articles
About a quarter of the way through the book I stopped reading. Did she really just do that? I thought. Here is the paragraph that struck me:
The crusted pan that baked the chocolate-melt bars slides off the tower of bowls crashes to the floor. Pick it up and watch it sink into sink.
I found that last part, “sink into sink,” open-your-mouth-and-furrow-your-brow fascinating. Not because she plays with the double meaning of sink, but because she drops her article.
Thus begins Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts, a book about how to live fully, experience more joy; about how to be thankful, even for the mundane, even for the tragedies. You don’t forget stories, and if you can prove your point with stories, you can teach people more effectively than if you just told them what to do.
The Oxford Comma Is Pretentious
If the Oxford comma is a prepster in chinos and a green LaCoste polo, I’m a hipster in a dirty flannel shirt and skinny jeans. If the Oxford comma is, in fact, Oxford, I’m the year you took off college to go chill with some Maasai in Kenya. If the Oxford comma is a MacBook Pro, I’m that manual typewriter you got at a yard sale that everyone sees and asks, “Is that a real typewriter? Can I try it?”
Who needs the Oxford comma? Shoot who needs commas in general?
Three Ways to Provoke Your Audience to INaction
Sometimes you just have to say, “Rules? No no no. F*&# rules. I’m not following any rules.”
That’s why on Saturdays, we at the Write Practice break some rules.
On Thursday, Matt Snyder wrote a great post about three ways to provoke your audience to action. He told a heart-wrenching story of a young girl forced into prostitution in Thailand. It’s the kind of story that makes you want to get up and smash some gross American men’s faces in.
It makes me want to do something.
But it’s not Thursday anymore. It’s Saturday, and on Saturday we do things differently.
Instead of provoking your audience to action, what if you provoked them to inaction?
Inject Your Writing With Interjections
What is an interjection? I like how F.J. Rhatz describes them, “a noisy utterance like the cry of an animal.”
I was speed walking from my bedroom to the kitchen to grab a snack. I was so famished I walked too fast and hit my pinky toe on a door. Ouch! Crap! Darn it!
Those are interjections.
