Writing Action (Lit Starts) , livre ebook

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60 pages

English

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A book of writing prompts from the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, authors of the best-selling 642 Things series. Focus on a single aspect of the craft of writing with help from the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. Writing Action kicks off with a foreword by an award-winning author and journalist Bonnie Tsui, who offers pointers for creating page-turning prose. The rest of the book consists of prompts and space to think, providing opportunities to explore how both high-stakes and low-key moments can be action-packed. Among other ideas, you'll be asked to write an account of: a highly competitive game of hopscotch an orange being peeled as if it were the last one on earth a car ride with an overly confident student driver a meal prepared by a cook who is really depressed the step-by-step process of opening a long-awaited piece of mail Take to a cafe, on vacation, or on your morning commute, and practice your creative writing a little bit at a time.Special FeaturesAdvice from a published writer, followed by promptsPart of a collection of single-subject writing prompt books by the San Francisco Writers' Grotto Check out the other books in the Lit Starts series: Writing Character, Writing Dialogue, and Writing Humor

Informations

Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	05 juillet 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781647009694
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0584€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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writing action
You re sitting at your desk, attempting to write about a hair-raising road trip that nearly derailed your whole life. Your pen hovers above the paper; you can feel the adrenaline firing up your brain. But this is the only sentence you manage to eke out: We were driving on I-5 and suddenly this car came at us out of nowhere, and then I was so scared I thought we were going to. . .
Already the words fall short of the mark. You were there . You saw the car coming the wrong way. You experienced the metallic tang of fear, the jolt of your heart, the strange quiet that descended over you like a blanket. But you can t seem to make your version of events match the reality.
No one said capturing pure, real-time action on the page was easy. Such writing relies on brilliant verb selection and a sense of mystery and timing and- bang- a satisfying crescendo.
This opening paragraph from Susan Casey s book The Devil s Teeth has just about everything you could want in an action scene:
The killing took place at dawn and as usual it was a decapitation, accomplished by a single vicious swipe. Blood geysered into the air, creating a vivid slick that stood out on the water like the work of a violent abstract painter. Five hundred yards away, outside of a lighthouse on the island s highest peak, a man watched through a telescope. First he noticed the frenzy of gulls, bird gestalt that signaled trouble. And then he saw the blood. Grabbing his radio, he turned and began to run.
Blood and geyser aren t often found in the same sentence. But Casey puts them together here and suddenly we re checking our own bodies for cuts. Also note the mystery: Who died, and who is this man watching through the telescope? A voyeur? A co-conspirator? Is he running from or to the geyser of blood? These are excellent questions, arising from the tension she creates. We want to turn the page to find out what happens next-and with action that s always the reaction you re after.
Back to the exciting road trip you re struggling to describe: After you ve written and scratched out that first sentence a few times, try a new tack. In the prompts section of this book, you ll find two road trip exercises. The first (on this page ) is to write a draft of your story. The second (on this page ) is a multistep prompt: First, write down all the verbs you can think of that are related to the event. Second, write down all the nouns. Then think about all the hyperbolic feelings and ideas that bubble up when you go over the event again and again, and write down adjectives to describe that hyperbole. When you re done, you should have a brainstorm sheet that makes you smile or laugh or even cry. It should bring back vivid memories, and there should be some pretty ludicrous words on the paper, words that you may not use very often. If you re not seeing words like that, keep adding to the sheet. Is, were, going, drive, it, car, man, kid, bicycle, tree, loud, sad, hot, black, silly, smoky, bored -your brainstorm sheet should not be trafficking in words like these. You want words like hurtled, exploded, ransacked, bulldozed, careening, monster, freight, wasp, stupor, slice, eardrum, unjust, crushing, animalistic, acrid, twisting, wine-dark , et cetera. You want words that provoke.
When you re done, try that first sentence of your road-trip story again.
For further inspiration, let s look at what happens next in that murderous excerpt from Casey s book, a few paragraphs on in the narrative:
Peter unhooked the winch, an inch-thick cable of steel, as the whaler rose and fell into troughs big enough to swallow it. He started the engine and powered two hundred yards toward the birds, where the object of all the attention floated in a cloud of blood: a quarter-ton elephant seal was missing its head. The odor was dense and oily, rancid Crisco mixed with seawater.
Oh yeah, Peter said, That s the smell of a shark attack.
So much is revealed here through precise word choices that support the action. We learn about the victim and the killer.