Category: Blog

When writing a story, one has many aspects to consider. However, the most important aspect is the bones. Most writers recognize this, and tend to read their first draft and think to themselves, “Yeah, that’s the story!” Then they send it out for publication and wonder why their story hasn’t been picked up. Well, while it is wonderful to have the bones of a story, it is another matter altogether to tell a story. The following will inform the reader on how to properly write a first, second, and third draft.

When writing a first draft you want to focus on the basic structure of the story, or as I referred to it previously, the bones of the story. This is the solid beginning, middle and end. It could come in many forms from a simple cause and effect format of (a) happens, then (b) happens, then (c) happens, to a timeline, or even just a bullet-point outline. The important bit is to know where the story starts and where it ends. If the story is inside, it will come out, and filling in the middle should not be a bother, it will come naturally. However, this is not a genuine story as of yet. While, your audience may understand the gist of your story, all they are really receiving are the spark notes. This is where a second draft comes in handy.

A second draft can come in many forms as well. It could be an annotated version of your first draft, or even an entire rewrite with some parts added and some parts removed, all of this will come when reviewing your first draft. The trick is to WRITE IT ALL DOWN! If something sounds wrong, make it sound right. If something doesn’t fit, get rid of it, or find a way to make it fit. Sometimes you will realize that the story has a much better flow if you removed a whole section entirely. The point is to find places to add prose, and dialogue and scenes to the story. It is not well enough to say, “This happened, then this happened, then that led to this happening.” That is just the basics. The audience wants to relate to characters, become a part of a world that is different than their own. The audience wants an escape and that is what you will give them in your third draft.

The third draft of your story is where the real craft of writing is presented. One must find the way to tell their story in a way that an audience can not only relate to, but also be entertained by. This is where one would refer to their second draft and find a way to tell the story almost second handedly. By the third draft the writer should and will most likely have a beginning, middle, and end, prose, dialogue, characters and character development, and maybe even a theme, or moral to the story. (Don’t worry, if you don’t have a moral, lesson, or hidden meaning in your story, your audience will find one for you.) It is always okay to write a story for the sake of writing a story. Also, the more drafts, the better. However, by the third draft one should have filled in the blanks enough to where an editor can take over and the final product can be decided from there.             Hopefully, this blog was insightful and helpful to budding writers hoping to be published, and there are many other helpful resources out there for refining one’s own literature. Drafting a piece id a very important aspect of completely a story and after a few drafts that fact will become incredibly apparent. Good luck to all the aspiring writers out there and keep your pen to the paper.

By: Jordon Moran

Writing can be like magic. Sitting down without a thought in your mind and ending with an entire story, crafted entirely of ink, paper, and imagination? There is something magical about that, and the more I learn about creative writing, or writing in general, the more like magic it becomes. Imagine, [JB1] if you will, a magical place filled with all your favorite characters from fiction. Who do you see? The Mummy that scared you as a child, or perhaps Hercules swooping you up in his arms to rescue you from its bandaged clutches? Maybe this whole scene is taking place on Blackbeard’s pirate ship as it hurdles through space being chased by the Mad God Azothoth. This is a real place! A place of magic and adventure, romance and betrayal, and it is an entire world of numerous settings and characters and stories in itself. This wonderous place is known in the literary world as the Public Domain.

The entire scene that I set up in the introduction is entirely possible to publish thanks to the public domain. Let us first understand what the public domain is. The public domain is intricately connected with our copyright laws. Basically, when an artist creates a character, they own that character under copyright law. They can profit from that character’s use in books, movies, and other forms of media. However, after a certain amount of time that creation would inevitably enter the public domain, thus shedding its copyright shackles and becoming free and legal for public use. This means that anyone can take a character or setting from the public domain and use it in their own original stories. In some cases, entire stories have been remixed in novel ways and rereleased successfully to the public, such as “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters” and even the “Shakespeare’s Star Wars” series. The possibilities are endless, and the public domain is a great tool for writers of all ages and skill levels. However, no magical place is complete without conflict; without a villain, and the public domain is no exception, though the villain may surprise you for it is an unlikely entity!

The public domain was a wonderful and amazing system that worked perfectly until the late 90s. In 1998 Mickey Mouse was about to enter the public domain. How great would that be? To have free access to use one of America’s most loved characters in your own art is a dream for some[JB2] . And it will remain a dream for a very long time. You see, the greed of Disney and other companies seem to be more important than allowing the public to retain access to such a cash cow, so Disney and others lobbied in congress to change the copyright laws, therefore extending their ownership of their characters for decades longer. This led to an over 20 year void in the public domain, and another character had not entered it until 2019. The saddest part is that the characters that Disney kept under their thumbs were never their own characters in the first place, including Mickey Mouse! Almost all of their most popular characters, from Aladdin to Mulan and a plethora of others, were taken straight from the public domain, and every time they release a new live action redux of these works they are extending their ownership of each character, thereby keeping it from the public domain even longer. It is a truly dastardly deed they are committing, considering the characters they are making money off were never their own characters in the first place.

When I learned of the travesty set upon one of my passions by the family friendly, and apparently heinously greedy company that was a pillar of my childhood I was conflicted. Do I continue to support Disney after knowing what I know, or do I boycott them? After all they are not only stealing characters that aren’t theirs to steal from the public, but they are also wrongly profiting off them. Why should I give them my money? After some (not much) contemplation I decided to boycott Disney. I do not want my hard earned going toward a bogus company that steals from the poor to give to the rich, and while I would never condone breaking any laws of any kind, I often think about the times we live in and how easy it is to pirate movies online. I also think about the moral question, “Is it really stealing, if the object in question was originally stolen from you?” That is for the individual to decide.

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By Jonathan Lallement on November 29, 2020

Chore-less Writing hear they have a paper to do? Why is it that a hobby can be hated so universally inside of a school? Easy answer is that schools kill fun but to be more precise, the education system creates a hatred of writing by adding tedious and pointless papers. I am sorry to every school system but I have never and will never get into the argument as of why pens are better than pencils. 

Why do schools do this? I assume to make it difficult and so we push ourselves while also to beat fair. I mean not everyone will have fun so why not make sure no one can have fun! 

So how do you have fun while writing? You can start by writing for any reason besides “I have to”. Writing because you want to just like anything else will make you better when you have to. Same goes for sports. The people who love to practice are often the best players on the field or court. That does not change when it is a more artistic hobby or profession. Once you are past the mental block of writing, words can pour in and to add to your arsenal you should start using rules that school teaches you to your essay. I ignored those to help further my point,but add transitions they are your friend as long as you keep a flow in the essay. Another thing to avoid that I have certainly embraced is to avoid terms like you or I which while they help solidify great points in a topic like mine, most writing will be persuasive, which those words may show bias, or informative where people should be focusing on your data not your opinion.

 Writing is a tool that can be sharpened but do not let it become a chore! If you do not have a class that will let you have fun and learn with a skill like writing then do it on your own because writing helps you understand so much of life and your own emotions. 

by: Devon Geary

One of the most important parts of a passage is the conclusion. Conclusions can give the reader a chance to make sure they understood the passage, as the author restates how they connect to the thesis. There are several ways the author can invoke a response from the reader using the conclusion, including using emotion, teaching a lesson, and/or calling the reader to action.

Call the Reader to Action

The author could take the opportunity at the end to ask people to share the post with other people, or they could ask the reader to think about the lesson that was being taught in the post. The author could also encourage an action that helps others. Maybe the post is about the environment, so the author could ask the reader to share the information and commit to recycling and doing things that would help keep the environment safe. They could also ask for comments at the end of the post, to keep in touch with what their readers are interested in.

To Invoke Emotions

The author can use rhetoric to do so. Lessons also apply here because the type of lesson can influence the reader’s emotions. Maybe it’s about how people can get through a rough patch in their life. That can remind readers of something they went through or are currently going through. Key words to use for this include: Joy, fear, anger, ruin, and senseless. Say the passage is about environmentalism again, if the conclusion has the words ruin and senseless in it to describe the damage to the planet, the reader is likely to feel anger or sadness about what’s happening.  

Length of the Passage/Genre

It is recommended that the conclusion be about 10% of the overall word count. For an essay, the conclusion may range between a paragraph and even multiple pages, depending upon how much is needed to reach the goal. For an essay conclusion, there could be quotes, questions, implications of studies, and be parallel to the introduction. Remember, do not add a brand-new point into the conclusion. For stories, make sure to wrap up the story in the conclusion. A cliffhanger is fine, but make sure not too much of the plot is left unfinished. The readers need to feel satisfied after reading it. For example, if the characters are solving a mystery throughout the book, then the main mystery should be solved in the conclusion, do not leave that as a cliffhanger. If one wants to leave them with curiosity about the next story, have the villain run away or give hints that there’s another mystery to be solved next time.

Conclusions are a necessary for all types of work, as they summarize the passage, and there are several optional goals, such as invoking emotion, teaching a lesson, and calling for action. A powerful ending can be influential. The last words the author writes to the reader stay with them, its important to get that right.

By: Jerod Buchler

                Yes, it is very important to meet a word count to get a work accepted, but once you meet that word count then you must be concise enough to not bore the reader. To such a point where the editor will not even finish reading it. When writing for school we are taught to do everything in our power to meet that word count even if that means sacrificing the quality of that work. That is a stigma that we need to cut through because as someone who will possibly need to read through these works if I end up getting lost in all of the useless words, I will give up on it and dismiss it entirely. When I give up on it entirely, then I will vote it out of the magazine.

So when I tell you that I don’t want to see phrases in your writing like, “as follows,” or even things like, “what I was saying earlier,” I mean it, because that is the stuff that takes away from good writing and makes it bad. Those are the phrases that make the whole piece tears apart at the seams. When these writings are too lengthy, they get boring, then whatever you had to say just gets thrown out the window, because no one can get through it. I would say that the crucial thing to remember about writing with  a word count is to not add things just for that word count add things that mean something for the writing even if that takes you longer to think about and come up with. So instead of writing something and focusing on the word count of it write something that you care about and the word count will follow, and you won’t have to worry about it. The biggest example that I can give about writing about something that you care about is take something that comes from the heart and write about that and there will never be a shortage of words needed to fill up that count. If you write something just to get some sort of response from people than there is a good chance that you will just wrack your brain trying to squeeze out enough words to make a word count.

by: Brianna Barron-Moreno

Proofreading is the uttermost important technique in order to produce great writing, this is the final step that a writer should always check through in order to make sure that their final piece doesn’t have any errors or mistakes; such as having spelling errors, poor paragraphs and sentence structure, and bad grammar. Rephrasing sentences that don’t flow in with one another, adding details, removing unnecessary information, adding commas, and correcting the tense are a few things that I’ll be explaining throughout my given examples and reasonings.

When going back to look at your final product keep in mind to always read your work double in order to find those small spelling errors or bad grammar that you might’ve missed the first time reading it. Here’s an example that shows some errors that people might’ve missed at first and went back to proofread:

As you can tell, in red, they took out some words that sounded repetitive or didn’t sound right while reading. This can be seen in the sentence “to which economics can be applied and be used to understand” instead of having “be applied and be used” just take out the unnecessary words and focus on the conjunction “and” instead. With that, you don’t need the extra “be”. The sentence would sound smoother as “be applied and used…”

Then, they would fix their bad grammar by inserting commas into some sentences to separate a series of words and avoid confusion. This can be seen in the sentence “to my surprise the daily news which I used to watch was now not just a means of watching new people debate but also a learning experience, I was able to…” At first this sentence sounds too long and just seems like it’s a run off sentence, not having any pauses, which could confuse the reader. Instead, adding commas in the appropriate areas can create a smoother and more direct sentence.

After you’ve made sure to look and fix your small errors, start to look at the bigger picture which sentences need arrangement, removement, and added details.  

Take the same paragraph, but this time look at the red words, observe how many of these sentences and words have been corrected, removed, or even rearranged in order to make the sentence structure sound smoothly while reading. Take the sentence “in 11th standard I along with some of my friends and my economics teacher, created a WPI index, by taking average prices of a basket of commodities from different wholesale markets to measure inflation.” Here they’ve corrected the tense, added details, rearranged the sentence, and replaced a word with a more relevant one, building the paragraph’s structure into a smoother, nicer flow.

In conclusion, proofreading is a technique that produces great writing, it helps improve your final product by giving it a nice written content flow that helps address the correct message towards your audience. When you’re done with your writing make sure to always read your work double this can help you pin point some spelling errors, bad grammar, words that don’t sound good or are repetitive, and even sentences that don’t flow in with one another and may need to be rephrased.

By Cassandra Carmichael

Blank pages can be scary. Sometimes it’s hard to pull an idea out of nowhere. We all need a little inspiration to get the gears moving. Try out these 5 tips for filling a blank page! If you like these tips or want to learn more on how to expand your writing techniques, consider taking Dr. Ford’s Creative Writing course here at our campus. You’ll learn more techniques like these and so much more!

1. Start with a name

Names have a lot of power. The meanings of a name or even the sound can start a whole train of thought. Starting with a name can help you build a character and a story around this name. Picking a name from a baby book or generator can spark some ideas. Say you randomly pick the name Dahlia. Maybe Dahlia is a small ginger girl with bright blue eyes. Maybe Dahlia is a very innocent and kind girl but lives in a big, dirty city with many mean and two-faced people. A flower in a field of weeds. Have fun with the meaning of your name and twist that story around it. Maybe your character has a pet dog they rely on for comfort and safety. This dog could be named Apollo, referring to the god of healing. Names can be a good start to a short story. 

2. A Memory 

Every story has a little bit of truth and a little bit of a lie. Try starting out with the truth. Think of a memory that either happened to you or someone you know or even on the news. Once you have that memory find the part you can exaggerate or change into something completely different to take the story on a different path. Change names or settings or dialogue and see where this new memory will take you. Say you had a memory about going on a boat trip with your dad. Nothing that exciting happened, but you can make it exciting. In the middle of the night, while the boat rocked under the moonlight, a mermaid came up to the side of the boat. You talked to the mermaid and decided to trade places for the night. With her magic, you become a mermaid and she becomes human. It didn’t really happen, but it started with the memory of your boat trip with dad.  

3. Your Dreams 

As college students, sleep isn’t that high on our things-to-do list, but everyone dreams sometimes. Dreams can be the perfect starter to a story. They can be completely wacky or tell us a lot about our inner selves. Maybe you had a dream about a gorilla sitting on your living room couch. You could write about how earlier, you had visited the zoo and secretly fed the gorilla your mom’s gross tuna sandwich. The gorilla loved it so much that he snuck into the back of your dad’s van and came home with you. The weirder the dream, the better the story.

4. A Picture

Any kind of visual can help you stir up a story whether it’s a painting, photograph, sculpture, or any form of art. Maybe a scenery or unique architecture can tickle an idea. Let’s say you see a picture of a cemetery flooded by water from some sort of storm. The coffins are pulled up from the ground and floating all around the field bumping into each other. From this visual build a story around it. Write about how everyone in Heaven was freaking out because their clothes are all wet and they don’t know why. Maybe a spirit from Heaven volunteers to investigate and travels down to Earth. After discovering what had happened to their poor graveyard, this spirit must find someone to restore the cemetery! But who will listen to a ghost? Anything that catches your eye is a great prompt starter. 

5. Trade Shoes 

If you’re an adult male and always write from the point of view of an adult male you are limiting your creativity. This might sound odd but think about your own writing and what you tend to lean towards. Most likely your own gender and age because that’s what you know the best. You know what a person your age does and doesn’t do. You know the advantages and disadvantages of your gender. But try trading shoes with someone else and see what new pathways you can take. This also leads you to research and exploring new ideas. Try branching out into new viewpoints to see what possibilities you can take. 

By Kassidy Boles

Writing poetry doesn’t have to be hard… but it is, isn’t it? The words don’t always flow, and we find ourselves unable to convey the emotion that poetry should so powerfully emphasis. What poetry comes down to is its structure, use of language, and whether or not to rhyme. To write from the heart can get lost in translation and my goal here is to help you, dear reader and perspective writer, understand why your poetry might be feeling a little… flat.

So, you’ve got your poem written out, but is it conveying what you want it to? Well, take a look at the poem’s structure. Is it consistent? This is important as a poem that is all over the place can lose a reader quickly and a poem without structure is just a blurb on the page. If you are writing poetry about a happy topic, long drawn out, deep lines will cut the reader to the core instead of uplifting them. It’s important to play around with your poem after you’ve gotten ink on the page so to speak. Here is where you as the author can experiment on your creation such as a mad scientist, crazed and needing that creative fix only you can create. You have the time now to play with your pace and diction, what concept you wish to emphasize.

But what is the language like in your poem? Are you using flowery words and telling someone how they should feel, or are you creating an image within the mind’s eye? Concrete language can make or break a poem. Avoiding abstract words and conveying meaning using literal terms will emphasize your poem in every way you want it to. Instead of saying, “She was happy,” try, “She shone from ear to ear brighter than the sun.” Words that are literal are vivid as they can be seen, felt, touched, or heard. You can use literal terms such as night, weeping, frigid, to convey mystery and unease while words like, cinnamon, violet, coffee, or tea could be worked together to talk about someone special. Even sensations can be produced through your poetry such as “hot like a summer day, the cacophonous roar of a hurricane, the smell of fresh baked apple pie,” are all examples of things someone can sense in a veritable way. Though poetry is to be interpreted by the reader, you don’t want your reader to get lost in those interpretations. The last thing you want is for the poem to be too vague. Specific details paint a picture and that’s what makes poetry so desirable. Comparisons will be your friend, events are relatable, objects are tangible. Never tell the reader how to feel, instead show them what it means to feel.

But what about rhyming? It’s easy to feel like a poem should rhyme as we are hit with it all the time in the media. We’ve all heard nursery rhymes and the whimsical tone they have. But poetry is not limited to such things and really, rhyming your poem can distract your reader from the poem itself. Make no mistake, to have a rhythm in your poetry and to rhyme are very different things. Take great caution as rhyming tends to feel forced if not used properly and the poem itself loses the momentum as you spend your time searching for the word that fits, instead of the right word. Instead of forcing your poem to rhyme, focus instead on how you want it to sound when spoken aloud. Practicing around friends and family will help with perfecting the sound of your poem. Focus on your syllables and which words will be stressed. Action words like nouns and verbs will have the stressed sound you’ll be looking for, while shorter words such as “a, I, the” will flow in between. Meter is used to refer to the sound pattern of a poem, it’s stressed and unstressed beat, and will give your poem the rhythm without the rhyme.