AVOID THE REPETITIVE PLAY BY PLAY

Write Better Now

Remember how I talked about how sometimes it’s okay to tell in our stories.

It is.

The thing is that you don’t want to tell all the time. A lot of us writers get addicted to little habits. Maybe-we have a love-of the em-dash- Maybe it’s all ellipses…all…the…time. Maybe we have an addiction to the semicolon; maybe it’s about starting all sentences with the word ‘maybe.’

Maybe?

Honestly, these writer habits come in all shapes and forms. It could even be something like sentence or paragraph length where every sentence is eight words long and every paragraph is three lines long.

You want to not get too stuck in these patterns.

So, tip #1 is to use telling language sparingly and don’t get addicted to it like it’s a sexy em-dash.

So, tip #2 is to avoid that repetitive play-by-play.

One of my favorite places to use that telling style of story is when it’s necessary to for one character to give another character a quick recap rather than a big play by play of the scene or events that just happened.

So, it’s a summary moment. Let me stress that it should be a short summary moment.

Like this,

“It was a hamster zombie horde!” Carrie said, pacing into the bathroom and back again. She told Shaun all about how the zombies chased her down the road and how they said they’d eat all the brains in the world if she didn’t stop humans from constantly giving them carrots.

“You are a freaking liar,” he said.

“Nope. Wish I was. But no.” She flung open the fridge. “Now I need you to help me find some cheese.”

“But I’m lactose intolerant!”

Pretty cool right? It’s much faster getting into the conflict and the stakes of the scene (Carrie must convince Shaun they need to find cheese) than if it was all dialogue recap of Carrie telling Shaun and the reader all over again about her previous adventures that we just saw two pages earlier.

EXERCISE TO HELP US WRITERS OUT

This is a pretty long, but interesting writing exercisefrom Writers.com, which has a ton of exercises at the link.

Via Writers.com

PLACES TO SUBMIT TO:

Genre: Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Payment: Not specified. Deadline: April 1, 2024.

Genre: Fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Payment: $300 for prose, $100 for poetry. Deadline: March 31, 2024. In celebration of Disability Awareness Month, there are no submission fees for writers living with both visible and invisible disabilities for the month of March.

There you go! And just as a reminder, I’m doing a slow roll-out of new community features on my Substack, which means a paid-subscriber only post on Saturdays over there. All the regular free stuff will still be here and there! I just need to make money sometimes, too. xo-Carrie

Originally published at https://livinghappy.substack.com.