Making Your Writing Sing

​Goodness, how the time flies! Here I am writing the review of the last Workshop and the next one's just around the corner. Luckily I can change the date on this blog post so none of you will know how terribly inefficient I am. Clever boy!

​We spent the morning looking at grammar and writing style, a dry subject to most, I'm sure, but I find it strangely fascinating. Did you know that when you use a list of adjectives there's a certain order you're supposed to use them in? Well, you do, now. 

Actually you probably did know this, unconsciously. The order is: quantity, value/opinion, size, temperature, age, shape, colour, origin, material. Try it. Four tall wooden crosses or Wooden tall four crosses? But what about It was a beautiful cold day? Could you get away with It was a cold beautiful day. Maybe. And rules are there for breaking, obviously. Just make sure you're breaking them deliberately. Perhaps the reason that sentence doesn't sound right is because it isn't.

We looked at creating image banks and colourbooks to help keep track of the words you use in your novel. I've recently discovered mindmapping for this. This free site is invaluable, for mapping all kinds of things and avoiding doing any actual writing. Check it out: www.wisemapping.com

We then had fun with hot, salty chips on the beach, and everyone tried to improve Susan's Bad Paragraph (deliberately bad, I should stress). I'm always amazed, when we do one of these "rewrite this paragraph" exercises, how many different and varied versions we get. Most people kept the hot, salty chips though, and I really can't blame them.

In the afternoon I put you all in a trance so that you could explore your characters' favourite places, immersing yourself in all 5 of the senses, and coming up with some pretty incredible descriptions of setting. Apologies to anyone who's still clucking like a chicken. I'm assured the effects will wear off soon. Probably.

So if any of this sounds like fun, why not join us for either Redrafting I or Redrafting II on Saturday 11th and 18th June respectively? Or even both? You never know... there might be chips.