The most challenging part of your day as a writer may be facing a blank piece of paper or an empty page on your monitor’s screen.  It may seem surprising to you, but despite our electronic age, there are still writers—professional as well as amateur—who begin each project in hardcopy.

Regardless of your Writing process, on days when you feel you lack direction, I suggest you begin by capturing the images that first come to your mind as you contemplate your project.  Work without concern for correct grammar or the sequence in which the words emerge.  Within a short while you should find yourself producing an unstoppable stream of verbiage.

As your pace slows, you can pause to write a brief outline of the direction in which your words seem to be going.  Confident that you will not lose direction, you can then glance back over your output.  Even if your thoughts is disjointed, you can look for patterns within the several chunks (if not actual paragraphs) of scattered images, dialogue or activity that have materialized.

You should be able now to move back and forth between the creative and editorial processes fairly easily.  I stress the first category—creativity—because writers often lose images they have glimpsed by becoming too absorbed in initial self-editing.  Remember, editing can always be accomplished at a future time.  But if you lose your inspired thoughts, they may never be retrieved…or built upon as you initially envisioned.

Experienced authors often have an established writer’s voice on which they can draw.  This is true whether they are writing the fourth book in a series, or constructing a non-fiction piece reflecting their actual Voice and personality.  Whether you are in this position, or creating a wholly new voice, you may wish to take a few moments and reflect on the tone, sensory images, level of vocabulary, and structure of language appropriate to your current work.  Please note that I am not referring to your voice as the teller of facts or a story, not the voices of any characters you may be creating.

With these elements in mind, you can enter the realm of delicately reshaping the vocabulary and organization of your piece.  As usual, I suggest you begin with the most obvious edits.  Personally, I have a tendency to employ overly complex sentence Structure that begs immediate trimming.  Another pattern that many of us face is the need to flip first and last clauses, sentences, and or paragraphs.  Like everything else, practice makes better, if not perfect, form.  By the time you’ve reached the end of a couple of sections, your structure should have tightened with increasing clarity.

Sometimes in the midst of mundane edits, I have a building sense of the truly impactful changes I wish to make.  If working in hardcopy (often late at night in the midst of classic films or predictable episodes of television mystery shows), I’ll make marginal notes regarding a character’s appearance, vocabulary, motivations, or inner thoughts regarding other characters.  When at the computer, I may utilize small sticky notes to record my ideas.

With obvious adjustments to structure complete, I move within the piece to maximize its overall flow and tone.  I usually begin by modifying nouns and adjectives.  In a previous blog on color [see Design Dilemmas for Authors, Part 3:  Color, May 30, 2015], I discussed various words that might be used in place of the word blue.  Likewise, consider how you would embellish a scene referring to a red sofa.  While inappropriate for a kid’s picture book (and most contemporary fiction), the author of an dramatic historical novel might say, “The heroine entered the study nervously and perched on the garnet colored velvet chaise lounge.”  In my own writing, I changed the simple phrase, “She heard the sharp sound of a gunshot” to, “She was startled by the sharp report of a bullet slicing the air.”

In the first example, I wish the reader to feel wooed by the distinctive color, texture and shape of a piece of furniture.  In the second, I turned from a matter-of-fact incident report to a description of my character’s response, which allows the reader to join in the heroine’s frightening experience.

Even changes in punctuation can alter the reader’s interpretation of a passage.  Consider the following examples with shifts in vocabulary, word sequence, and punctuation:

~  Experience the unique luxury of a journey to the Orient Aboard the majestic Rms Empress of Britain.  [Advertising copy similar to posters for the ship’s 1932 world cruise]

~  I journeyed from Hong Kong to Honolulu aboard the RMS Empress of Britain.  [A matter of fact statement appropriate for any type of writing]

~  Truly…I did enjoy my trip aboard the RMS Empress of Britain.  [A plea to be believed; perhaps for the dénouement of a murder mystery]

~  I immensely enjoyed my sojourn from Hong Kong to Honolulu aboard the luxurious RMS Empress of Britain.  [An elegant, almost fussy statement, appropriate to a romance novel]

There are many ways to strengthen your writer’s voice for each project you undertake.  Reading other works in the same genre by authors you like and dislike will provide examples to emulate as well as to reject.  There are also many reference materials that will broaden your ability to describe people and occurrences in an articulate manner appropriate to your genre.  You might begin by perusing your own reference library to ensure you have:  A couple of grammar-cramming style books [The Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press Stylebook are standards]; dictionaries [including ones for foreign words or phrases you might use]; and a thesaurus or two.

Beyond these basics, consider how you can use Internet search engines and other materials.  One of the most interesting sources I’ve found is obituaries [see Shopping for Characters, May 12, 2015].  Not only is this a great place to find physical descriptions of people, but you will also discover comprehensive biographies and sometimes, even the settings through which men and women of past generations walked.

Wishing you the best in your writing endeavors,
Jeanne Burrows-Johnson, wordsmith and design consultant

For more ideas to strengthen your Wordpower^© and branding, please visit:  www.ImaginingsWordpower.com