Tag: research
Vocabulary? Can’t I just write how I talk?
[found on time4writing.com]
“Why is a Strong Vocabulary Important?
We use spoken and written words every single day to communicate ideas, thoughts, and emotions to those around us. Sometimes we communicate successfully, and sometimes we’re not quite so successful. “That’s not what I meant!” becomes our mantra (an often repeated word or phrase). However, a good vocabulary can help us say what we mean.
For example, let’s say that you are outside in your yard and see a large black car stop in the road. You can see four tinted windows on one side of the car, and you assume there are four tinted windows on the other side, too. Just then, the driver’s door opens, and a man wearing white gloves steps out. He walks to the back of the car and looks underneath. He shrugs his shoulders, climbs back into the car, and drives away. After you remember to close your mouth, which has been hanging open, you run next door to tell your friend what you saw. What do you say? If you know a couple of key words, you can quickly explain to this person what you saw. Instead of describing the number of windows and the length of the car, you could simply say that you saw a black limousine (a long, luxurious car). Then, instead of describing the man with the white gloves, you could say you saw the chauffeur (someone paid to drive a car or limousine) walk to the back of the car. Knowing these key words can help you quickly and effectively communicate your meaning.
When you’re faced with a writing assignment, a good vocabulary is an indispensable (very important or necessary) tool. If you have several synonyms (words with similar meanings) in your repertoire (“toolbox”), you’ll be able to choose the best word for the job. Avoid vague words like “stuff” or “things” when you write. These words do not give the reader a good sense of your meaning. Also, use strong verbs that give the reader good information.
Here’s an example:
- POOR: People do a lot of things.
- BETTER: People perform a lot of tasks.
Work on building your vocabulary so that you can choose the stronger, more descriptive words in your writing.
You may also want to vary your vocabulary depending on your audience. Are you writing for children? Then stick with simpler words. Are you writing for college students? Then pull the more difficult words out of your “toolbox” to avoid talking down to them. It’s important to consider your audience when writing.
You may also find it difficult to choose the best word for a sentence when you’re writing. If you have a strong vocabulary, these choices will be easier!”
For more great tips on writing from Time4Writing, click HERE.
[found on http://www.time4writing.com/writing-resources/vocabulary]
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Secret & Silent—Inspiration
“In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people’s lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time.”
― Marge Piercy, Braided Lives
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100 Delectable Adjectives
[found on dailywritingtips.com]
“Adjectives — descriptive words that modify nouns — often come under fire for their cluttering quality, but often it’s quality, not quantity, that is the issue. Plenty of tired adjectives are available to spoil a good sentence, but when you find just the right word for the job, enrichment ensues. Practice precision when you select words. Here’s a list of adjectives:
Adamant: unyielding; a very hard substance
Adroit: clever, resourceful
Amatory: sexual
Animistic: quality of recurrence or reversion to earlier form
Antic: clownish, frolicsome
Arcadian: serene
Baleful: deadly, foreboding
Bellicose: quarrelsome (its synonym belligerent can also be a noun)
Bilious: unpleasant, peevish
Boorish: crude, insensitive
Calamitous: disastrous
Caustic: corrosive, sarcastic; a corrosive substance
Cerulean: sky blue
Comely: attractive
Concomitant: accompanying
Contumacious: rebellious
Corpulent: obese
Crapulous: immoderate in appetite
Defamatory: maliciously misrepresenting
Didactic: conveying information or moral instruction
Dilatory: causing delay, tardy
Dowdy: shabby, old-fashioned; an unkempt woman
Efficacious: producing a desired effect
Effulgent: brilliantly radiant
Egregious: conspicuous, flagrant
Endemic: prevalent, native, peculiar to an area
Equanimous: even, balanced
Execrable: wretched, detestable
Fastidious: meticulous, overly delicate
Feckless: weak, irresponsible
Fecund: prolific, inventive
Friable: brittle
Fulsome: abundant, overdone, effusive
Garrulous: wordy, talkative
Guileless: naive
Gustatory: having to do with taste or eating
Heuristic: learning through trial-and-error or problem solving
Histrionic: affected, theatrical
Hubristic: proud, excessively self-confident
Incendiary: inflammatory, spontaneously combustible, hot
Insidious: subtle, seductive, treacherous
Insolent: impudent, contemptuous
Intransigent: uncompromising
Inveterate: habitual, persistent
Invidious: resentful, envious, obnoxious
Irksome: annoying
Jejune: dull, puerile
Jocular: jesting, playful
Judicious: discreet
Lachrymose: tearful
Limpid: simple, transparent, serene
Loquacious: talkative
Luminous: clear, shining
Mannered: artificial, stilted
Mendacious: deceptive
Meretricious: whorish, superficially appealing, pretentious
Minatory: menacing
Mordant: biting, incisive, pungent
Munificent: lavish, generous
Nefarious: wicked
Noxious: harmful, corrupting
Obtuse: blunt, stupid
Parsimonious: frugal, restrained
Pendulous: suspended, indecisive
Pernicious: injurious, deadly
Pervasive: widespread
Petulant: rude, ill humored
Platitudinous: resembling or full of dull or banal comments
Precipitate: steep, speedy
Propitious: auspicious, advantageous, benevolent
Puckish: impish
Querulous: cranky, whining
Quiescent: inactive, untroublesome
Rebarbative: irritating, repellent
Recalcitant: resistant, obstinate
Redolent: aromatic, evocative
Rhadamanthine: harshly strict
Risible: laughable
Ruminative: contemplative
Sagacious: wise, discerning
Salubrious: healthful
Sartorial: relating to attire, especially tailored fashions
Sclerotic: hardening
Serpentine: snake-like, winding, tempting or wily
Spasmodic: having to do with or resembling a spasm, excitable, intermittent
Strident: harsh, discordant; obtrusively loud
Taciturn: closemouthed, reticent
Tenacious: persistent, cohesive,
Tremulous: nervous, trembling, timid, sensitive
Trenchant: sharp, penetrating, distinct
Turbulent: restless, tempestuous
Turgid: swollen, pompous
Ubiquitous: pervasive, widespread
Uxorious: inordinately affectionate or compliant with a wife
Verdant: green, unripe
Voluble: glib, given to speaking
Voracious: ravenous, insatiable
Wheedling: flattering
Withering: devastating
Zealous: eager, devoted”
For more great tips on writing from Daily Writing Tips, click HERE.
[found on http://www.dailywritingtips.com/100-exquisite-adjectives]
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How To Write Historical Fiction
[found on caroclarke.com]
“…The realities of the everyday things in your chosen time period will shape what your characters can and can’t do. This will constrain your own plot choices. It’s part of the challenge and joy of writing historical fiction to share with your characters the real problems, the real world, they live in. It stretches your imagination. If you aren’t fussy about your details, if you think it’s all right to have Willem know latitude and longitude or for Maria Dolores to carry a purse, then you aren’t up to the demands of historical fiction. Your characters will not be real, your story will have no life, and you will have failed your readers. If you’re that kind of writer, you’ll have stopped reading this essay as soon as you hit the word ‘research’. But you’re that other kind of writer, the historical novelist, the one who cares. You’ll have done your mountain of research both for the love of it and for the love of your story. What to do with all those cherished, hard-won facts?
…Once you’ve created your plot, you begin to write. Knowing the realities of the small, everyday things of your time period now allows you to conjure an authenticity into Willem’s and Maria Dolores’ lives. Long skirts swept the floor. Willem knows she’s hiding in the courtyard because he sees the lines her skirts have made in the sand his sister sprinkles on the paving tiles. Maria Dolores seizes a tankard to brain him – it’s leather, not metal, and her escape attempt collapses in laughter. When a Calvinist mob, incited by Willem’s sister, bays for the blood of the Catholic woman hidden in their midst, Willem and Maria Dolores are able to escape across the ice in the harbour, for this is the time of the Little Ice Age, when broad rivers froze.
Notice that the sand on the paving tiles, the material of the tankard, the unusually cold winter, are only included because they help propel the plot. As much as you’d love to discuss the construction of the typical Dutch house or the rise of Calvinism in the Netherlands, these aren’t pertinent to the actual events in the story. It’s pertinent that the leader of the mob has skates, it’s pertinent that the gunpowder in Willem’s pistol cakes when soaked with ice-water, it’s pertinent that the woolen skirts of the time were thick and heavy enough to stop a bullet. But if a beloved fact (the wheat for their bread came from Poland) doesn’t propel the action of the story, it doesn’t belong. You’ll use less than 20% of the facts you’ve researched in the events of your story, but the other 80% filling your head will give you a heightened understanding of the period, illuminating your characters and their world for you so that what the reader sees is the distillation of your sympathetic imagination, a richness condensed….”
For more great insights about historical fiction from Caro Clarke, click HERE.
[found on http://www.caroclarke.com/historicalfiction.html]
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What Goes In…Is What Comes Out
“To have output you must have input. It helps to go on a period of creative nourishment, or dolce far niente, clearing the brain. Go to bed with the cat, some flouffy pillows, tea and a book which could not in any sense be called improving. Read for fun for a change: superior Chicklit is good, or children’s classics. You are not allowed to try and analyse what the author is doing. After a good sleep, go and do something new, or that you haven’t done for a while….”
― Lucy Sussex
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In The Beginning…No, Now.
“They say everything that can be written has been written. I say we are just getting started.”
― Andrew Barger, Mailboxes – Mansions – Memphistopheles: A Collection of Dark Tales
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How To Write A Biography
[found on biographybiography.com]
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“Decide whom you want to write about, your parents, grandparents, great grand parents, ancestors, other relatives, friends, idols, heroes, yourself or any other special person.
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Collect as much information as you possibly can, from his or her birth date to the most relevant facts of his or her life through letters, journals, newspaper clippings, pictures, and most importantly, through conversations with elder family members (it would be a good idea to take notes or record conversations). .
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Organize your thoughts before starting to write, think of that part of the person’s life you would like to highlight. Some useful questions can be: who?, what?, where?, why? and how?
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Other questions to ask would be: what makes this person so special and interesting? How can he or she be best described? Which were the events that marked or changed his or her life? In what way was he or she an influence to family, society or professionally?
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When writing about somebody else, describe his or her appearance, habits, features and way of talking. If you do not remember a name, use replacements such as: friend, mate or boss.
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Edit the biography; read it aloud to feel of the rhythm and the sound of it, it will also help you notice if you are repeating information.“
[found on http://www.biographybiography.com/howtowriteabiography.html]
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When Do You Stop Researching?
[found on howtoplanwriteanddevelopabook.blogspot.com; by Mary Carroll Moore]
“A children’s book writer sent me the following question: “I am interested in writing a non fiction book for 11-18 year olds and wanted to know how to go about preparing myself to do the research for the book efficiently?” This writer had a timeline for her book and wanted to complete it by the beginning of December.
Research is both a blessing and a bane for the book writer. It’s very easy to research now that the world is at our fingertips via the Internet.
But this wealth of resources also poses a serious side tracking problem: How can you really tell when you’re researching and when you’re just avoiding writing?
I love to research. I worked as an editor for a small press for 18 years and was constantly being asked to research this or that fact from different authors’ books. I knew how to get online and sail through the mediocre listings into the really meaty facts. I became good friends (via phone) with several reference librarians at my local library–always a good call to make when stumped by the various options on the Internet. Librarians (mostly) love research and they are there to help.
But often I found myself cruising from one article to the next, opening more layers of links, and finding it hard to actually come back to the writing I was supposed to be working on.
Since someone was paying me to get the editing done, and I was under a deadline, I always forced myself away from the research eventually. But when you’re writing your book, you may not have this outer-imposed structure. You may be your only boss, creating your own timeline, as my reader above is. How do you stay efficient with research and still get your book done?
Researching Your Readership
I have dozens of stories from students in my classes who discovered they were writing to the wrong readership–after they did some bookstore research. One woman thought her novel was geared toward adults but after she spent an hour browsing the YA bookstore shelves, she realized her language, tone, and subject matter was really meant for younger reader, in their late teens, as she had been when she experienced the specific changes she was writing about. Another student was preparing to finish his memoir when he did some belated bookstore research and realized he didn’t want his story on the memoir shelf–it was way too raw and dangerous emotionally for him to imagine his family members picking up a copy of a “true story” that contained their histories. So he switched horses in midstream and became a novelist.This sounds basic, but many writers forget that bookstores (and online bookstores) hold a wealth of information to help us orient our book projects. So researching your readership is first on the list.
For the reader who wrote me the question for this post, as someone writing a book for a certain age group, you really need to know your audience well. What language do these readers prefer? They may be much more sophisticated readers than you were at that age, or they may not be. What do they learn in school–and is your topic too sophisticated or way to basic for them?
And if you’re delivering a certain topic and need scientific, cultural, political, or historical data, you need to translate what you research into wording that kids would understand, crafting your writing to lead them point by point through the material.
Research Information
After you’ve researched your reader and gone through the steps to explore your book’s topic, you may have the urge to spend time on the Internet, in the library, or in your own book collection, making sure your facts are in order. This is really important, and it used to be the provenance of fact checkers at a publishers. No more. It’s now up to the writer, and publishing contracts have long clauses to make sure the writer holds all responsibility for errors of fact in their manuscript.I love to research place, and I do that early on in the research process for my books. I physically visit the location of my book as many times as I can, read other books set in that location, and take lots of notes–especially sensory details like the way things sound, smell, and look in that setting. It’s important to convey accuracy of place to allow the emotion within the place to touch your reader. And, believe me, readers who are familiar with the place will let you know if you’ve made mistakes in reporting the details of their favorite locations.
Historical facts are also important to get right. Watch out for the Internet on this one. When I was a professional editor at the small press in the Midwest, we rarely accepted the first or even fifth Internet mention of a fact as truth. It took lots of browsing and comparing notes from different sites. If a fact was repeated frequently, then it was more likely true. But I collected a list of my favorite fact-checking sites that seemed reliable, and they were the ones I visited most often. University research sites, library databases, and reputable publications online were the ones I leaned on most–and I strictly avoided the chats, blogs, and personal opinion posts that could be just that.
Putting Research in Its Proper Place
Make sure, though, that research doesn’t take over your writing time. It’s a great time waster for us creative types, especially with the Internet making the world of research so very accessible. Hours (days!) can go by while you happily browse, and not one word of your book actually gets written.When I am deep in research, I set a kitchen timer. When the timer rings, I stop–no matter how exciting that next link looks. I go back to the writing, to the blank page, and do what I came here for. It takes discipline to leave the candy store of research and actually write. But it’s the only way to make a book.
This Week’s Writing Exercise
1. Make a list of topics you’d like to research for your book project. They could be more information on the setting you’re writing about, historical facts, readership research, or anything you are interested in that might enhance your story.2. Practice disciplined research: get a kitchen timer or set your cell phone alarm for 30 minutes. Begin your research. See if you can stop when the alarm goes off. Make sure you make notes or print interesting pages.
3. Make notes to remind you where you were, so you can return easily.
4. Look over the research notes you’ve made. Take a highlighter and underline sections that might be useful to inform a chapter, character, or focus of your book.”
Editing Addict, LLC 