Creative Writing General Guidelines When Revisiting Posts

Endeavour to:

• include elements of time, place, mood and cultural shadings;

• consider the addition of sensory words of sight, sound, touch, smell and taste;

• focus on conflict whenever possible;

• view the entry through the lens of your predefined goals to establish continuity;

• always post with passion because that is what triggers the imagination of future readers. Ultimately, you wish future readers to feel rewarded or compensated for their emotional investment rather than feeling cheated;

• portray yourself as being compelling, interesting and believable. Describe any urge to laugh or cry. Collectively, these will encourage future readers to care about you;

• recognize and describe moments of enlightenment and transcendence;

• vary sentence length and structure.

Strive to avoid:

• portraying yourself as a passive spectator watching events play out;

• bland entries without inspiration, depth or texture;

• being too clever, too colourful, too cerebral;

• using any clichés at all;

• too much emphasis on pretty descriptions, clever phrasings and hip dialogues.

• composing sentences and paragraphs that are too long. Wording which is long-winded and distracting in both style and content. Always get to the point;

• dialogue that is:

  • too much like normal speech. Too many incomplete sentences, pauses, restarts, profanity and conversation      fillers will distract from the ultimate read;

  • repeating information already revealed in earlier posts;

  • uncharacteristic of yourself, other people, the times, the place, etc.(ex. too flowery);

  • reflective, passive and neutral instead of being active, direct and emotional, especially for yourself;

  • peering-in-a-mirror self descriptions. Instead, try to accomplish through interactions with others;

  • entries which are rushed, abrupt, or lack passion;

• the overuse of:

  • the same words, phrases and sentence construction too often;

  • passive verbs such as 'were' and 'was';

  • 'to be' verbs (am, is, are, was, were, being, been). Consider vivid engaging verbs instead;

  • words like 'very', 'much', 'really', 'great', or 'nice' when a more detailed description will prove more colourful;

  • the passive voice, which is the reversal of the normal subject/verb order of a sentence;

  • 'ly' words that stress emphasis but only result in verbiage. Examples of these dispensable adverbs include: 'actually', 'totally', 'absolutely', 'completely', 'continually', 'constantly', 'continuously', 'literally', 'really', 'unfortunately', 'ironically', 'incredibly', 'hopefully', 'finally', etc.;

  • the use of uncommon suffixes such as: 'ingly', 'ize' and 'ness';

  • speech tag adverbial phrases and '-ly' tag-alongs such as: 'he said hesitantly';

  • speech tag explanations such as: 'whimpered' and 'scoffed'.