What is Foreshadowing?

 

Foreshadowing Tips

by Bob Bruggemann

Wikipedia says foreshadowing is a literary device in which an author suggests certain plot developments that might come later in the story. This is an example of foreshadowing:

Sam thought about what the perpetrator said. It was nothing he hadn’t heard before; he’d been threatened many times. The light turned green and he swung around the corner. His eyes panned down the quiet block of single family homes and he knew something was wrong.  His partner’s house was dark and so was his. Sam rolled up to the curb and turned off the engine. Leaving his cap on the passenger seat, he pulled out his service revolver, loaded a round into the chamber, and cautiously stepped out of the car.   

Sam’s actions give a blatant description of what could happen next. The reader has been forewarned that something might be wrong.  It could be a false alarm or it could be something devastating. Only time will tell.

The reader will fall into this trap easily and without suspicion. It’s perfectly natural for a man to enter a tense and dangerous situation with his gun drawn… but suppose he enters the foyer, the lights suddenly come on, and he hears:

“Surprise! Happy birthday, Honey!”  He found a room full of neighbors in the living room, holding up drinks for a toast. The joy faded as they focused on Sam’s cocked 9mm pistol.

This scenario is a variation of foreshadowing called “misdirection” or otherwise known as a “Red Herring.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreshadowing for more examples on the following:   

o   Premonition

o   Master patterning

o   Red herring (misdirection)

o   Prophecy’s and omens

As an author, you control your world, along with everyone and everything in it.  Never be afraid to experiment and push your muse to the limit. There are no limitations to your imagination. Use red herrings and foreshadowing to great advantage.

For more great writing tips, get The Writer’s Choice Newsletter at http://www.creativewritinginstitute.com.

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How Mothers Find Time to Write

Finding Time to Write

by Deborah Owen, CEO, Creative Writing Institute

1. Without a doubt, the number one place to write undisturbed is on the commode. Take a cup of Java and enjoy your outing. Use the spray can a lot. It may dampen your paper, but it also stops questions like, “What are you doing in there for so long?”  

2. At the Laundromat. If you don’t mind writing while standing, the washer makes a great desk – at least until it starts spinning. Then you’re writing Chinese. 

3. The best ideas always come in bed. Keep a flashlight, pen, and paper by the bed. When the bloody muse pays you a visit in the night, prop one eye open with a toothpick and try to scratch something decipherable.

4. When the car is being repaired. Oh yes, this is a great place. Greasy waiting rooms are definitely created by men for men and writing is a great way to avoid the smelly guy with the three day beard. 

5. Many pastors encourage their flock to take notes during sermons. It could be considered sinful if you didn’t obey.

6. Have playtime with the kids. They scribble with crayons and you write… quietly… for 20 minutes. If they’re extra quiet, they earn a piece of candy. 

7. Trade babysitting with a friend and steal some writing time on the side.

8. Tape water wings on the kids and throw them in the deep end of the pool. Nah. Bad idea.

9. Stay up late, get up early. Write during the kids’ nap time or your lunch break.

But here’s the best one:

10. Tell the family, “When I get 30 minutes of undisturbed writing, you get supper.”

 MOTHER’S DAY SPECIAL: $50 rebate on any writing course at http://www.creativewritinginstitute.com. Sign up online as usual and ask for your rebate by writing to CEO, deborahowen@cwinst.com. You have one year to take your course. Your rebate will arrive when you finish the class. Sign up today.

How to Write Tight

Cutting Verbiage
By L. Edward Carroll
Tutor at Creative Writing Institute

What’s wrong with simplicity? When you read a typical contract, business memo, or phone bill, that might be your first question. Those who construct such documents have their reasons for making them all but impossible to read but creative writers that want their readers to understand their message must simplify. It’s difficult to write easily read material.

Begin by deleting every word that isn’t absolutely essential. Look at multi-syllable words and replace them with shorter ones that convey the same meaning. According to William Zinsser’s, On Writing Well (p 7):

“Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what–these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank.”

Writing is a process. No one writes perfect sentences from scratch. While writing your first draft, don’t be concerned with sentence construction, punctuation, proper grammar, and spelling. Get your thoughts down as fast as you can and don’t look back. After you’ve finished, get down to the business of editing and polishing.

Think conciseness. Get to the point quickly. Rewrite your sentences and see how many words you can save. For example, an excerpt from Quick Access (reference for writers) by Lynn Quitman Troyka (p 79) says:

“As a matter of fact, the television station which was situated in the local area had won a great many awards as a result of its having been involved in the coverage of all kinds of controversial issues.”

Why didn’t they just say – The local television station won many awards for its coverage of controversial issues.

Learn to spot empty words and phrases and eradicate them. Don’t use more than three prepositional phrases per sentence, and no more than two in consecutive order. Place “he said” and “she said” tags at the end of the sentence. Delete as many forms of the verb “is” as possible. On your last edit, replace the verbs with the jazziest verbs you can dream up. Balance long sentences by following them with two very short sentences. Get to the point! Get rid of the excess baggage and all that remains will be meat.

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5 Power Tools for Smashing Mini-Blocks

Frozen Words
by
Noelle Sterne

You’re barreling along in the middle of a piece, congratulating yourself on great progress when suddenly, for no apparent reason, you freeze. Paralyzed, you stare at the clock and watch your life, fame, and creativity drain away like sangria from a cracked pitcher. Don’t despair or bury your head in the refrigerator. Just keep going.

This admittedly obvious remedy also frees you from an insidious writer’s malady – the one called the “I-must-produce-only-gold” syndrome. Part of the cure is to accept the inevitable byproduct of writing . . . the “garbage” that every writer creates on his/her way to anything worthwhile.

As a mentor once told me, “Write out the junk.” Doing so is essential to reach your goal. The process is often a means of discovering where you want to go. To keep going, try these five methods.

Freeing Tools

1. Combat the “only-gold” syndrome by repeating like a mantra, “It’s only my second draft” (even if it’s your thirty-fifth). Writing takes time, persistence, and relentless effort. Another worthy mantra is Justice Louis Brandeis’ pronouncement: “There is no good writing. There is only good rewriting.”

2. Talk to yourself in the middle of the draft. I use italics: What do I really want to say? What got me fired up in the first place? What feelings do I want to express? How do I want the reader to feel? Should I use metaphors or straight talk?

You can delete your questions later – but I’ll bet from your asking, the answers will pop up like toast from a hot-wired toaster.

3. Have faith in the self-talking method. The answers will surface. American poet Richard Wilbur knew this: “Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.”

The secret, and scary part is to “step off,” even if you feel like your brain is as vacant as a twenty-something comedy. Muster your writerly courage and swallow, in a literary free-fall.

4. If you still run into a blank wall, talk to yourself again. One of my first draft paragraphs looked like this: “Or, as Richard Wilbur says, ”Just jump off into the blank of your mind. Something should come to you.” Check quote and correct.

Your mind is a fantastic, retentive, associative computer. You can prompt it to produce whatever you need.

5. Keep writing alternatives. Repeat your last good phrase and begin pumping out whatever comes to mind. However forced, lame, ridiculous, or off-the-mark, write the junk out. It’s only your fiftieth draft.

For these drafts, I’ve also developed a system of slashes and codes. To separate the alternatives, I use slashes: “stupid/stupider/go sell shoes.” Mark your best variations with a special symbol, such as * or +.

I also use several codes:
W = WORD, VERY BAD.
FIX = FIX THIS!
REP = REPetition of words, ideas, sounds.

Create any system that makes sense to you.

These five ideas may sound elementary, but they work. They’re effective, powerful tools that help you smash your writing mini-blocks. How do you deal with mini-blocks?

Author, editor, ghostwriter, writing coach, and spiritual counselor, Noelle publishes nonfiction and fiction in print and online venues. In Trust Your Life: Forgive Yourself and Go After Your Dreams (Unity Books), she helps writers and others apply practical spirituality to release regrets, relabel the past, and reach lifelong yearnings. See www.trustyourlifenow.com.

Would you like to have a private tutor? Creative Writing Institute eagerly awaits you. Check us out!

April Fool’s Day Writing

Writing During April Fool’s Day

By Joe Massingham
Volunteer Coordinator for Creative Writing Institute

Don’t be a fool – be a writer!

April 1, as everyone in the western world surely knows, is the day for playing jokes on unsuspecting, family, and colleagues – sometimes even complete strangers!

The origin of All Fool’s Day (as the day was originally named) is a mystery in itself; perhaps there’s a crime novel there for some up-and-coming writer! However it began, though, the idea has remained essentially the same.

In France, for some reason that is lost in the mists of time, the most common joke has been to pin a paper fish on the the back of the victim. Whatever jokes/tricks you play in your part of the world, be sure they’re done midnight as vengeful angels supposedly report those who overplay the game.

Joseph Boskin, a professor of history at Boston University, conducted research and explained that the practice began in the time of the Roman emperor Constantine, when a group of court jesters and fools told the emperor that they could do his job better than him. The amused emperor allowed a jester to do his job for one day. The jester ‘emperor’ passed a law that called for tomfoolery that day and the custom became an annual event.

“In a way,” Prof. Boskin wrote, “it was a very serious day. In those times, fools were really wise men. It was the role of jesters to put things in perspective with humor.”

This explanation was published in a newspaper article in 1983. There was only one problem – Prof. Boskin invented the whole story! Its publication completed the most widespread April Fool’s joke the world has seen to date.

Perhaps the most positive message in this tale is that it’s possible to get anything published if you start small and work hard enough at it. You CAN succeed as a writer and reap the satisfaction that a byline affords.

Without a doubt, the first draft won’t satisfy even you, let alone your critics. The second may produce a more acceptable manuscript, and the third will probably come close to actually being publishable. That’s the proper time to lay your work aside and let the mysterious creative gnomes that live in your brain cave do a bit of cutting and reshaping on the emerging jewel.

Just be patient. Don’t make a fool of yourself by getting too hasty. One day you’ll find your story finished, prepped, and knocking on your door, waiting to be freed from its cage. No fooling!

Check out Creative Writing Institute and get The Writer’s Choice Newsletter to get great writing tips at http://www.creativewritinginstitute.com.

Romance Writing Tips

Writing Good Romance
by guest blogger Terri Forehand

Have you toyed with the idea of writing romance novels? Romance writing is a big portion of book sales, you know, so there is a viable market for your work if you write well. Here is the key, you must construct your story well and have realistic main characters that have a problem along with having a romance threading throughout the story. Girl meets Boy is not enough of a story to keep your reader hooked. There must be a sense of attaining real LOVE.

Today’s reader is sophisticated and wants a more complex storyline. Even young adult romance has a complex storyline to include all kinds of bumps in the road. For example, think of vampires and wolves.

Sexual tension in a romance novel can be blatant and crude or subtle and sweet, depending on the author, the storyline, the publisher, and what the editors find most appropriate. Sometimes a writer must change a scene to accommodate what an editor thinks will sell. The author must be comfortable when writing this into the story and decide beforehand how to treat sexual tension. If an editor asks you to change a scene, you have the final decision on whether you want to make a sweet story into a crude one. Know your own values and what you want your story to say before submitting it.

Christian romance is even more complicated than Girl meets Boy because it will always have a Good versus Evil theme woven throughout the plot. A moral or ethical decision is often added to the complexity of finding the right partner. The sexual tension may be slightly less edgy then other romance tales.

As with any good story, it must have these elements:

• Believable and likeable characters – no reader likes a story when they can’t idea with the character
• Interesting plot – the plot must be believable
• Conflicts – true life conflicts spell “reality”
• A theme – every word of your story should carry the same theme from beginning to end

And above all else ROMANCE. Whether you decide on a sweet and tender romance or old couples falling in love in a nursing home, romantic LOVE must be part of the general picture. There is no romance without true love. When true love ceases to exist, the truly good scenes die. Your reader is expecting romance and if your story is written properly, your reader will feel it and come back for more.

*For more great tips, get Creative Writing Institute’s newsletter, The Writer’s Choice, at http://creativewritinginstitute.com/newslettersignup.php.

Ways to Recycle Your Articles (See Below – Mad March Hares)

Reuse those Articles!
by guest blogger, Hope Clark

1. Create an Ebook

Categorize, edit, marry the topics into sections, and voila! An ebook. Give it serious attention, though.
Your posts WILL need editing, trust me. Time tends to show us how our writing has improved, and some topics
get a tad stale in the interim as well. You must keep your material fresh!

2. Create a class

Whether a webinar, conference presentation, podcast or coaching, identify the subjects that address the same topic and see if there isn’t a thread of a theme there. If you have as many posts as I do, you might have multiple classes available in that pile.

3. Fluff them up for recycling

Take your posts and connect them to current events or more recent changes, mantras, fads or lessons. Your
old material takes on new life with the latest added to it.

And you thought your blog posts were just free writing that had no financial worth!

* C. Hope Clark is author of Lowcountry Bribe – A Carolina Slade Mystery, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bell Bridge Books (www.bellbridgebooks.com). See her author site at www.chopeclark.com . Hope is also editor and founder of FundsforWriters.com (www.fundsforwriters.com) – a writer’s resource recognized by Writer’s Digest Magazine for its 101 Best Websites for Writers for the past eleven years.

For more great writing tips, sign up for The Writer’s Choice Newsletter at the top of this page: http://www.creativewritinginstitute.com

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Mad March Hares
by Joe Massingham, Volunteer Coordinator

The expression ‘mad as a March hare’ comes from early European communities that, almost two thousand years ago, observed hares (and probably other animals) when they emerged from winter hibernation leaping and dancing about in the spring sunshine.

Their dancing had a more important role than enjoying the warmth and stretching of their legs. It was, in fact, the first stage of a courting ritual which had the production of offspring as its ultimate goal, thus ensuring their survival and strengthening of particular species. The hares may have seemed mad to a casual onlooker but like most actors in nature’s theater, they had a clear role to play.

In many ways our first steps into the writing world might be similar to the hares’ emergence. We get the urge to write; we twitch and hop, type and scrawl, and generally carry on as though some grand new world anxiously awaits our donation. A few tentative tries may bring the despair of non-success. Where to now in our quest to become a writer?

Well, like the hares, we have to learn. They observe their elders and betters in the hare world. If we do the same in our world, we’ll soon see that would-be authors learn from the more experienced.

Writing interaction may come in adult learning classes or online writing forums. In a world where time seems to be in shorter supply than ever, an online writing course may be a good choice. At Creative Writing Institute, you can work one-on-one with a private tutor. You will learn five times faster under private tutelage and the price will be less than what you would pay for instructor-driven classes where attention is divided among 10 or more students.

Personal feedback is a bit like the hares chewing fresh grass in the spring. Experiment with it. Take a few nibbles and see how you like it. It’s a safe and inexpensive way to learn the craft of writing. Choose your own field to dance in and increase your chances of writing success.

Register for your class today and start it tonight at http://www.creativewritinginstitute.com. Payment plan available at no extra charge. No administrative or registration fee. Check it out.