Category: Blog

By: Matthew Carter

The Economy of Language

By Matthew Carter

Whether you are a seasoned writer, or relatively new to the scene, one aspect of writing is the most important. Can you guess what it is? WORDS! It should go without saying that language, more importantly word choice, is at the forefront of all writing skills. It is important for a writer to understand the message they are trying to convey, and to deliver that message as cleanly as possible.

Oftentimes writers may use an excess of lacklustre words when one impactful word is what completes the thought in the cleanest way. It is important for a writer to utilize their vocabulary to write at their best. The following two sentences describe the same setting, one using enhanced vocabulary, and one using filler words.

It was a very hot day at the beach.

It was a sweltering afternoon in Daytona,

Here we can see that these sentences are conveying the same message with different deliveries. It is important to understand that a story is only as good as it is conveyed. One may write an incredible story with a poor word choice which suddenly diminishes the value of the story. It is common for the first draft to not be entirely polished with the most effective word choices. It is typically in the editing process where revisions to direct use of language is made.

One great way to understand the importance of words is to look at language as an economy. If you had to spend a dollar for every word you used in a story, how often would the word “Very” be used? Chances are you would avoid this word at all costs. There are a variety of key exercises one may use to practice their effective word choice. One warmup one may use is writing in the Haiku format which only allows for limited syllables. Another practice would be to describe your favourite story in exactly 10 words, no more and no less.

Next time you write a piece of work, look over your word choice and who knows, maybe your story will go from very average to phenomenal.

By: Maddy Campbell

You sit down at your desk, feeling creativity surging through your head. You open your computer and look at the blank canvas in front of you. With hands hovering over the keyboard, you wait for inspiration to strike. You keep waiting. You then get frustrated and slam your computer shut. 

Believe me, you are not alone in this feeling. Writing poetry is a great way to express your emotions and explore your creativity, but it can be difficult to get started. One common issue when preparing to write poetry is finding inspiration. Writer’s block is tricky, and staring at a blank page with frustration can keep potential poets from writing their masterpieces. Through the following 3 practices, you will feel more confident in finding inspiration for your poetry than ever before. 

1. Choosing a Form

When new ideas are not generating, the first step toward tackling writer’s block is choosing a form of poetry. This can affect what you write about. There are so many styles to choose from free-verse, sonnet, or haiku. Each form comes with its own sets of rules, which we will not be going over here, and some with a common subject. Sonnets, for example, are typically written about a strong emotion or memory. Haikus are commonly used to describe nature, like “The Old Pond” by Matsuo Bashō. Picking a style of poetry can help channel ideas like a funnel onto the page. 

2. Finding Your Focus Through Meditation

What if you already know how you want to write your poem, but the subject is still eluding you? The next step that helps me focus is meditation. That may sound drastic, and a little cliché, but taking the time to center yourself and tune into your thoughts can create an explosion of ideas. Now, I do not mean “pull out your yoga mat and light some candles” meditation. Take a moment and sit in your space. Close your eyes and slow your breathing. Listen to your surroundings. Are you comfortable? Is it quiet enough? Is it too quiet? Is your space set up for you to be productive? If you answer no to any of these questions, a small change to your space can be the needed change to get started. 

3. Optimizing Your Space

You picked your style of poem, made your space the most optimal for writing, and you still have no idea what to write about. Do not let that stop you. Think about why you want to write poetry. If you love writing about nature, go outside. Observations can be an amazing way to find inspiration. Sit on the ground and watch the skies or trees. See how the world around you communes with itself. Take notes, record the sounds you find special, then use the meditation skills you practiced earlier to think about what sticks with you. Maybe nature is not your cup of tea. Find a journal and start writing about your feelings, childhood memories, and stories about your friends. 

Writing poetry is not just for old men with quill pens. Reflective free-verses about your favorite birthday or a descriptive haiku about an oak tree are art that you can treasure and share. Do not let the stigma of great art cloud your thoughts. Finding a simple idea can create the best poems if you give yourself the time.

By: Christian Copley

The central idea behind most if not all forms of writing is the theme. Without the theme there is no story, there is no meaning, and there is nothing to take away from a piece of writing. The theme is the backbone of an entire piece of writing. Therefore, without a shadow of a doubt, the most important thing to do before you begin writing is to figure out what the topic of the piece will be.

Start simple. If the topic is easy to remember and straightforward, then the rest of piece is most likely going to come naturally to you as well.

Although simplicity can make things easy, that doesn’t mean you are not allowed to expand on the theme and have multiple topics or ideas spread throughout your piece. While it can sometimes be difficult to have multiple topics in one piece of writing, it is a good way to keep the reader interested.

One of the best examples that shows how topic enhances a story is the original Star Wars trilogy. While these movies are not technically pieces of writing, the ideas behind them are great examples of how the theme affects a story.

The main theme behind these movies was the idea of the Hero’s journey. Throughout the entire trilogy, we see the main character, Luke Skywalker, evolve from some farm boy who lives on a desert world, into a magic wielding samurai who fights an evil empire with nothing but a laser sword.

The entire trilogy explores how Luke grows throughout his adventures; however, the films also explore other topics along the way to enhance the viewer’s experience. The films are called Star Wars, so obviously there is probably some sort of war going on in space. Naturally, the films also explore the war being fought between the Rebel Alliance and the evil Galactic Empire.

One of the greatest things a writer can do with multiple themes, is to answer questions that a viewer might have. Going back to Star Wars, something the viewers might be asking is “well, what are the villains doing?” Something that the movies do well is show certain scenes explaining what the villains are planning to do to stop the Alliance. Having these scenes scattered throughout the films is a great way to give the viewers a sense of scale of the movie’s universe and, as an added bonus, answers some of the viewer’s questions.

There are many ways to expand upon the theme of a piece and knowing where to begin is not always clear. Whether the topic is simple or complicated, the entire piece of writing is dependent upon how well the writer makes the piece connect with the theme. Knowing what you want the topic to be undoubtedly ends up affecting how well the piece of writing resonates with the reader.

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.

---

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.