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16/08/2019

WHAT IS YOUR WRITING PERSONALITY?


The 16 personalities graphic can reveal how your dialogue, descriptions, length, and pacing affects your writer's personality in the genre market.
The graphic works like the Myers-Briggs personality test (MBTI), which, analyzes how you interact with the world, take in information, make decisions, and how you structure those decisions.
The writer's personality test operates in a similar manner, matching genres and writing styles based on how you use dialogue, descriptions, prose, and pacing.
In the personality chart, we see the four following categories with their two subcategories, much like the Myers-Briggs test.


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01. ECHP
• Expressive dialog.
• Concise descriptions.
• Hefty prose.
• Patient motion.
* Genre: Sports and Recreation; Military Fiction; Historical Fiction


02. EDHP
• Expressive dialog.
• Detailed descriptions.
• Hefty prose.
• Patient motion.
* Genre: Military Fiction; History; Biography


3. ECBP
• Expressive dialog.
• Concise descriptions.
• Breezy prose.
• Patient motion.
* Genre: Science Fiction; Mystery; Juvenile Fiction


04. EDBP
• Expressive dialog.
• Detailed descriptions.
• Breezy prose.
• Patient motion.
* Genre: Fantasy; Science Fiction; Juvenile Fiction


05. ECBK
• Expressive dialog.
• Concise descriptions.
• Breezy prose.
• Kinetic motion.
* Genre: Fantasy; Suspense; Mystery


06. EDBK
• Expressive dialog.
• Detailed descriptions.
• Breezy.
• Kinetic motion.
* Genre: Mystery; Thriller; Romance


07. ECHK
• Expressive dialog.
• Concise descriptions.
• Hefty prose.
• Kinetic motion.
* Genre: True Crime; Historical Fiction; Military Fiction


08. EDHK
• Expressive dialog.
• Detailed descriptions.
• Hefty prose.
• Kinetic motion.
* Genre: Action and Adventure; Science Fiction; Fantasy


09. SDHP
• Stoic dialog.
• Detailed descriptions.
• Hefty prose.
• Patient motion.
* Genre: Cooking (Recipé); Health and Fitness; Science


10. SCHP
• Stoic dialog.
• Concise descriptions.
• Hefty prose.
• Patient motion.
* Genre: Business and Economics; Education; Self-Help (Tutorials)


11. SDBP
• Stoic dialog.
• Detailed descriptions.
• Breezy prose.
• Patient motion.
* Genre: Humor; Cooking (Recipé); Juvenile Fiction


12. SCBP
• Stoic dialog.
• Concise descriptions.
• Breezy prose.
• Patient motion.
* Genre: Performing Arts; Religion; Self-Help (Tutorials)


13. SDBK
• Stoic dialog.
• Detailed descriptions.
• Breezy prose.
• Kinetic motion.
* Genre: Romance; Erotica; Literary Fiction


14. SCBK
• Stoic dialog.
• Concise descriptions.
• Breezy prose.
• Kinetic motion.
* Genre: Juvenile Fiction; Juvenile Non-Fiction; Literary Fiction


15. SDHK
• Stoic dialog.
• Detailed descriptions.
• Hefty prose.
• Kinetic motion.
* Genre: Literary Fiction; True Crime; Biography


16. SCHK
• Stoic dialog.
• Concise descriptions.
• Hefty prose.
• Kinetic motion.
* Genre: Historical Fiction; True Crime; Literary Fiction


***


The original graphic lists genres after the traits.
These are the types of books most marketed with that particular style of writing.
In theory, it should be the genre you will be best at tackling, but we will talk about that in a bit.
In the meantime, let us go through each of the traits and talk about what they mean when it comes to your writing personality.
Hopefully, you will learn a little bit about yourself as a writer in the process.


***


1. DIALOGUE
This aspect of your writing personality looks at not only the amount of dialogue you use, but what role your dialogue plays in your story.


• Expressive (E)
— Expressive dialogue is important in character-driven stories.
You write dialogue that not only gets the conversation moving, but reveals your characters through the subtext of the words not spoken.
Your dialogue is plentiful and dynamic.


• Stoic (S)
— Stoic dialogue functions on in a linear path.
You say what you mean and mean what you say.
Stoic dialogue is often found in idea-driven stories or stories for young readers since readers of those stories are not looking to read between the lines of your dialogue so much as they are looking to further understand or experience the events of your plot.


***


2. DESCRIPTIONS
This is the most subjective part of your writing personality, as the amount and type of descriptions you use transcend genres.
While there are certainly preferences within genres for different levels of descriptions, do not feel boxed in or compelled to change how you describe your world based on what you write.


• Detailed (D)
— Detailed descriptions are important for transport fiction: stories heavily relying on readers experiencing something new and foreign, whether it is a world, a society, or a lover.
As a detailed writer, you excel at building empires and psyches in which readers can lose themselves.


• Concise (C)
— This is used in prose where readers already have context for the setting.
Concise writers acknowledge the intelligence and experience of their audience and allow them to fill in the blanks, focusing instead on telling the story at hand.
It gives an extra weight to everything you deign to mention.


***


3. PROSE
The prose section talks about the length of your story.
Notice that the genres listed with hefty or breezy often deal with the amount of information passed (different from how you describe it).
Now, length and pacing can be related, but are not necessarily married to one another.
In other words, a short book does not mean it is a quick read, and vice-versa.
The cross-over genres for this section are cooking, self-help, science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction.
Of all the genres, these are the most versatile when it comes to length.
Just something to point out.


• Hefty (H)
— Hefty prose deals with a lot of information and complexities, therefore requiring more space to detail it all out.
As a hefty writer, you are not afraid of the big projects.
An epic fantasy or Julia-Child-inspired cookbook is right up your alley.
You want a manuscript you can use as a pillow when you collapse in exhaustion after finishing it.


• Breezy (B)
— Breezy prose is for young readers, page-turners, and oral presentations.
It is essentially writing that readers want to consume in only a few hours, not a few weeks.
As a breezy writer, you are skilled at packing in a lot of information and pulling us through all the nuances of your story in a short amount of words.


***


4. MOTION
By motion, the graphic is talking about pacing: the progression of plot, tension, and character growth in a given story.


• Patient (P) – patient motion is more conversational.
There is still rising action and tension, but the stakes are a lot lower.
It is more common in nonfiction books, but can also be found in writing that revolves more around the exploration of an idea than solving an immediate problem.
Patient writers are skilled at creating characters and relationships readers fall in love with so much, we would read a scene of them shopping in a grocery store, just to spend time with them.


• Kinetic (K) – kinetic motion is all about the rising action, big climaxes, and disastrous pitfalls.
If you write kinetically, you continue to raise the stakes in your story so the reader is always wondering what’s going to happen next.


***


# WHAT IF I DO NOT LIKE MY WRITER'S PERSONALITY?


If you do not like it, change it!
This is not your DNA and personal psyche, it is how you approach your craft.
You can train yourself to write in any style.
It may not come naturally to yourself at first, but if you are an SCHK and want to be an EDHK, all you have to do is focus on intentionally making your dialogue and descriptions match the genre marketability you desire.


***


# WHAT IF MY WRITING PERSONALITY DOES NOT MATCH THE LISTED GENRES?


That is not necessarily a bad thing.
You will notice there is a lot of overlap in the genres.
At the end of the day, how you write something is not as important as what you are writing about.
If you can knock out a romance as an EDHP, go for it!
The listed genres are a great guide to what readers are expecting when they pick up different types of books, but the #1 rule in writing is that THERE ARE NO RULES!
Some of the best breakout novels have been ones that find a way to do the unconventional in astonishing ways.


***


Courtesy: Amber Helt
©

27/06/2019

10 SIMPLE WAYS TO EDIT YOUR BOOK


1. Rest your manuscript.


“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”
— Henry David Thoreau


2. Listen to your manuscript.


“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”
— Dr. Seuss


3. Search for troubling words.


“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
— Mark Twain


4. Remove or replace your crutch words.


“I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”
— Dorothy Parker


5. Remove all double spaces at the end of sentences.


“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”
— Elmore Leonard


6. Search for problematic punctuation.


“An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald


7. Run spell check or use an automated editing program.


“Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you’ll die of a misprint.”
— Markus Herz


8. Subscribe to The Chicago Manual of Style


“To write is human, to edit is divine.”
— Stephen King


9. Format accordingly.


“The Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.”
— Jasper Fforde


10. Do not over-edit.


“It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.”
— C. J. Cherry


***


Courtesy: TheWriteLife
©

24/06/2019

PROSE RHYTHM


In the best writing (as with the best art), the form and content work together.
Within writing, this means that the language enhances the subject being written about.
This is called "prose rhythm."
And it is one of the most "unsung heroes" of craft.


Though poets spend more of their time laboring over word choice and attempting to enhance the flavor of a poem with the sound of the words it uses, fiction prose benefits from some level of this attention as well.
Within good writing the choice of language should reflect what is being written about.
It is an effect similar to how good cooks pick seasonings that bring out the flavor of what they are cooking.
Sometimes you just need a dash of salt.


This effect is one of the most difficult mistakes to diagnose (especially to self-diagnose) in young writers' prose.
However, when the prose rhythm is working against the subject, the result can be discordant without being obvious why.
It is like the wrong seasoning in a recipe it takes a skilled pallet to taste a dish and know it needed oregano instead of basil.


Think about this example describing the creek behind one of my childhood homes:


> “The creek flowed lazily. It had an occasional burst of speed, but usually drifted gently. There were many deep pools. A layer of green scum rested many of the pools because it was so slow. Dragonflies flitted about this green scum. They formed an endless dance.”


Obviously, I exaggerated the effect for illustration, and so this is just horrible writing all around, but it is easy to see why this image of a lazy creek and the endless dance of dragonflies does not work together with these simple sentences and descriptions.
With complex and compound sentences and some wordier descriptions this can be almost immediately cleaned up:


> “The creek trickled lazily past the apartments, and though it had an occasional burst of speed, the water usually spilled gently from one deep pool to the next. It moved so slowly that a layer of emerald green scum formed over many of the pools where a cotillion of red and blue dragonflies danced an endless, mesmerizing dance.”


Not going to win me any nobel prizes, but so, SO much better than the first because the subject and the language are not working against each other.
A flowing river and choppy prose just do not mesh.


The same thing happens if you try to describe combat in long complex sentences with "soft" verbs:


> “Cynthia gazed up to see that the warship was falling down right on her position, and there was no way that she would be able to get out of it's path in time.”

..instead of energetic verbs and short sentences:


> “Cynthia's eyes shot up to the sky. The warship tore downward. It was going to crash right where she was standing. She could run, but she wouldn't make it.”


In fact, if the language is working against the subject, any scene will take on the quality of a "sour note" about it.
It is very similar to using the wrong spice in a dish; it is hard to know why, but it just does not taste quite right.


***


Authors often use short sentences with very vivid verbs during combat or other exciting sequences, or long sentences during scenes of prolonged tension.
I guarantee you that when Stephen King busts out his patented one phrase paragraphs, he is exactly representing a short thought breaking a long one--usually something happening directly in the mind of his characters.
Some authors are so superfly, they even take prose rhythm to the level of the word, using tons of T word alliteration if they are trying to describe the pop of distant gunfire or a sonorous use of luscious and smooth sounding consonants and vowely words if they are trying to portray a seduction.
Some authors even arbitrarily alter sentence construction to be deliberately awkward when they are in the head of confused characters.


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If it is so unknown, is it really that important?


Prose rhythm is one of the elements of craft that is generally considered to separate average writing from good writing.
(And a discongruent prose rhythm is one of the things that separates competent writing from bad writing.)
While prose rhythm is extremely important within the literary genre and will be the focus of many an MFA lecture, it can enhance and enrich even the most commercial of "genre tripe."


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Just be careful.
You CAN go too far.
Prose rhythm usually takes several revisions to get just right, and if you are firing it off in a first draft, you are probably coming on a little too strong.


This effect should be like the perfect seasoning of herbs and spices.
Subtle and enhancing, but not the meal itself.
It is as easy to add too much prose rhythm as it is to add too much salt, thyme, or garlic.
If your prose rhythm is not subtle--if it involves extremely uncharacteristic word choices, conspicuous constructions, it is going to jump off the page and pull your reader right out of the story.
It should be a thing they notice with delight on a second or third reading, not something that hits them on the head right away.
MFA programs have a word they use for this ham-handed overuse of craft:
being "writerly."
But in the real world, a reader will just roll their eyes and perhaps say,


> "Oh you think you're so clever, don't you?"


***


Key pointers:
• Calmer scenes are better narrated with longer sentences and "soft" verbs.
• Scenes with lots of action and tension are better narrated using shorter sentences and "energetic" verbs.


Courtesy: Chris Brecheen
Link: http://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2013/06/prose-rhythm.html
©

06/06/2019

“Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.”
— George Lucas


27/05/2019

“If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.”
— WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM


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