ferrellweb

At times, it helps to think of writing as carpentry. That way, writers and editors can work from a plan and use tools stored on their workbench. You can borrow a writing tool at any time. And here's a secret: Unlike hammers, chisels, and rakes, writing tools never have to be returned. They can be cleaned, sharpened, and passed on.

—Roy Peter Clark, 50 Writing Tools

Below are links Roy Peter Clark's brief essays, found at the Poynter Institute's website. If you'd like a little more information before you leap, click to 'plus' icon next to a title for a short excerpt or description.

• Writing Tool #1: Branch to the right
  Begin sentences with subjects and verbs, letting subordinate elements branch to the right. Even a long, long sentence can be clear and powerful when the subject and verb make meaning early...
• Writing Tool #2: Use Strong Verbs
  Use verbs in their strongest form, the simple present or past. Strong verbs create action, save words, and reveal the players...
• Writing Tool #3: Beware of Adverbs
  The authors of the classic "Tom Swift" adventures for boys loved the exclamation point and the adverb. Consider this brief passage from "Tom Swift and His Great Searchlight":
  
  "Look!" suddenly exclaimed Ned. "There's the agent now! ... I'm going to speak to him!" impulsively declared Ned...
• Writing Tool #4: Period As a Stop Sign
  Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style" advises the writer to "Place emphatic words in a sentence at the end," which offers an example of its own rule. The most emphatic word appears at "the end." Application of this tool — an ancient rhetorical device — will improve your prose in a flash...
• Writing Tool #5: Observe Word Territory
  I coined the phrase "word territory" to describe a tendency I notice in my own writing. When I read a story I wrote months or years ago, I am surprised by how often I repeat words without care...
• Writing Tool #6: Play with Words
  Just as the sculptor works with clay, the writer shapes a world with words. In fact, the earliest English poets were called "shapers," artists who molded the stuff of language to create stories the way that God, the Great Shaper, formed heaven and earth...
• Writing Tool #7: Dig for the Concrete and Specific
  Novelist Joseph Conrad once described his task this way: "By the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see." When Gene Roberts, a great American newspaper editor, broke in as a cub reporter in North Carolina, he read his stories aloud to a blind editor who would chastise young Roberts for not making him see...
• Writing Tool #8: Seek Original Images
  Seek original images. Make word lists, free-associate, be surprised by language. Reject cliches and "first-level creativity."...
• Writing Tool #9: Prefer Simple to Technical
  I once learned a literary technique called "defamiliarization," a hopeless and ugly word that describes the process by which an author takes the familiar and makes it strange. Film directors create this effect with super close-ups or with shots from severe or distorting angles. This is harder to do on the page, but the effect can be dazzling...
• Writing Tool #10: Recognize Your Story’s Roots
  Recognize the mythic, symbolic, and poetic. Be aware (and beware) that common themes of news writing have deep roots in the culture of storytelling...
• Writing Tool #11: Back Off or Show Off
  When the news or topic is most serious, understate. When the topic is least serious, exaggerate...
• Writing Tool #12: Control the Pace
  Long sentences create a flow that carries the reader down a stream of understanding, an effect that Don Fry calls "steady advance." Or slam on the brakes...
• Writing Tool #13: Show and Tell
  Good writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like "freedom" and "literacy." Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy and public policy lurk. In that place, teachers are referred to as "instructional units."...
• Writing Tool #14: Interesting Names
  The attraction to interesting names is not a tool, strictly speaking, but a condition, a kind of sweet literary addiction. I once wrote a story about the name Z. Zyzor, the last name listed in the St. Petersburg, Fla., phone directory. The name turned out to be a fake, made up long ago by postal workers so that family members could call them in an emergency, just by looking up the last name in the phonebook. What captured my attention was the name...
• Writing Tool #15: Reveal Character Traits
  Reveal character traits to the reader through scenes, details, and dialogue...
• Writing Tool #16: Odd and Interesting Things
  At its best, the study of literature helps us understand what Frank Smith describes as the "grammar of stories." Such was the case upon my first encounter with Emma Bovary, the provincial French heroine with the tragically romantic imagination. I remember my amazement at reading the scene in which author Gustave Flaubert describes the seduction of the married and bored Madame Bovary by the cad Rodolphe Boulanger...
• Writing Tool #17: The Number of Elements
  A self-conscious writer has no choice but to select a specific number of examples or elements in a sentence or paragraph. The writer chooses the number, and when it is greater than one, the order. If you think the order of a list unimportant, try reciting the names of the Four Evangelists in an order other than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John...
• Writing Tool #18: Internal Cliffhangers
  What makes a page-turner, an irresistible read, a story or book that you can't put down? Well, lots of things. But one indispensable tool seems to be the internal cliffhanger...
• Writing Tool #19: Tune Your Voice
  Of all the effects created by writers, none is more important or elusive than that quality called "voice." Good writers, it is said time and again, want to "find" their voice. And they want that voice to be "authentic," a word from the same root as "author" and "authority."...
• Writing Tool #20: Narrative Opportunities
  Journalists use the word 'story' with romantic promiscuity. They think of themselves as the wandering minstrels of the modern world, the tellers of tales, the spinners of yarns. And then, too often, they write dull reports...
• Writing Tool #21: Quotes and Dialogue
  Reporters tell me that one of the most important lessons they learn in journalism school is to "get a good quote high in the story." When people speak in stories, readers listen. But people speak in different ways...
• Writing Tool #22: Get Ready
  Great writers get ready for the big story, even if they cannot see it. They expect the unexpected. Like Batman, they cinch up a utility belt filled with handy tools. They report and report and research and then report some more, filling up a reservoir of knowledge they can use at any time...
• Writing Tool #23: Place Gold Coins Along the Path
  How do you keep a reader moving through your story? Don Fry tells this parable...
• Writing Tool #24: Name the Big Parts
  All good stories have parts: Beginnings, middles, and endings. Even writers who achieve a seamless tapestry can trace the invisible stitching. A writer who knows the big parts of a story can name them for the reader, using such techniques as sub-headlines. The reader who sees the big parts is more likely to remember the whole story...
• Writing Tool #25: Repeat
  Repetition works in stories, but only if you intend it. The repetition of key words, phrases, and story elements creates a rhythm, a pace, a structure, a drumbeat that reinforces the central theme of the work...
• Writing Tool #26: Fear Not the Long Sentence
  Everyone fears the long sentence. Editors fear it. Readers fear it. Most of all, writers fear it. Even I fear it. Look. Another short one. Shorter. Fragments. Frags. Just letters. F...f...f...f. Can I write a sentence without words? Just punctuation? ...:!?
• Writing Tool #27: Riffing for Originality
  The day after the vice-presidential debate of 2004, I read a clever phrase that contrasted the appearance and styles of the two candidates. Attributed to radio host Don Imus, it described the differences between "Dr. Doom and The Breck Girl."...
• Writing Tool #28: Writing Cinematically
  Before there was cinema, writers wrote cinematically. Influenced by the visual arts — by portraits and tapestries — authors have long understood how to shift their focus back and forth to capture both landscape and character...
• Writing Tool #29: Report for Scenes
  Tom Wolfe argues that realism, in fiction or non-fiction, is built upon "scene-by-scene construction, telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative." This requires, according to Wolfe, "extraordinary feats of reporting," so that writers "actually witness the scenes in other people's lives" as they take place...
• Writing Tool #30: Write Endings to Lock the Box
  From our earliest years as readers, we learn that stories have endings, however formulaic. The prince and princess live happily ever after. The cowboy rides off into the sunset. The witch is dead. The End. For the journalist, the ending presents a problem...
• Writing Tool #31: Parallel Lines
  Writers shape up their writing by paying attention to parallel structures in their words, phrases, and sentences. "If two or more ideas are parallel," writes Diana Hacker, "they are easier to grasp when expressed in parallel grammatical form. Single words should be balanced with single words, phrases with phrases, clauses with clauses."...
• Writing Tool #32: Let It Flow
  As you stroll around the garden of The Poynter Institute, several inspirational sayings, carved into marble, greet you. One comes from the great sports writer Red Smith: "Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."...
• Writing Tool #33: Rehearsal
  The word 'procrastinate' derives from the Latin word cras, meaning tomorrow. Never write today what you can put off 'til tomorrow. Procrastination is experienced by writers as a vice, not a virtue. During the process of not-writing, we begin to doubt ourselves, sacrificing the creative time when we could be drafting our stories....
• Writing Tool #34: Cut Big, Then Small
  After we overcome writer's block, it is easy to fall in love with our words. That is a good feeling, but it can lead to a bad effect. When we fall in love with all our quotes, characters, anecdotes, metaphors, it seems impossible to kill any of them. But kill we must. In 1914 British author Arthur Quiller Couch wrote it bluntly: "Murder your darlings."...
• Writing Tool #35: Use Punctuation
  Some teach punctuation using technical distinctions, such as the difference between 'restrictive' and 'non-restrictive' clauses. Not here. I prefer tools, not rules. My preference shows no disrespect for the rules of punctuation. They help the writer and the reader, as long as we remember that such rules are arbitrary, determined by consensus, convention, and culture...
• Writing Tool #36: Write A Mission Statement for Your Story
  In the words of Donald Murray, good writers turn stories into workshops, intense moments of learning in which they advance their craft...
• Writing Tool #37: Long Projects
  Anne Lamott's great book "Bird by Bird" gets its title from an anecdote about her brother. At the age of 10, he struggled with a school report on birds. Lamott describes him as "immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead." But then, "my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"...
• Writing Tool #38: Polish Your Jewels
  I've seen the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian. At 45 carats, it is big and blue and buxom, but not beautiful. Smaller gems have more facets and reflect light more brilliantly. The same can be true of writing....
• Writing Tool #39: The Voice of Verbs
  The gold standard for writing advice is this: "Use active verbs." Those three words have been uttered in countless writing workshops with such conviction that they must be true. But are they?
• Writing Tool #40: The Broken Line
  Some writing tools work best for straight reports. Others help the writer craft fully realized narratives. But the author will often need tools to do both: construct a world the reader can enter, and then report or comment upon that world. The result is a hybrid, best exemplified by a story form I call "the broken line."...
• Writing Tool #41: X-Ray Reading
  By the third grade, I knew I was a good reader. My teacher, Miss Kelly, told me so. She was impressed, she said, that I could recognize the word 'gigantic' in a story about Davy Crockett, who killed 'a gigantic bear.' Why, then, did it take me 20 more years to imagine that I was a writer?
• Writing Tool #42: Paragraphs
  In a book review, critic David Lipsky tears into an author for including, in a book of 207 pages, "more than 400 single-sentence paragraphs -- a well-established distress signal, recognized by book readers and term-paper graders alike."...
• Writing Tool #43: Self-criticism
  Limit self-criticism at the beginning. Turn it loose during revision...
• Writing Tool #44: Save String
  When writers tell me stories about working on big projects, they often use one of two metaphors to describe their method. The first is composting. To grow a good garden you need to fertilize the soil. So some gardeners build a compost heap in their yards, mounds of organic material containing scraps, like banana peels, that others would throw away...
• Writing Tool #45: Foreshadow
  Not long ago, I saw two movies that reminded me of the power of foreshadowing. In each case, clues planted early in the narrative offered what a dictionary definition would describe as "vague advance indications" of important future events...
• Writing Tool #46: Storytellers, Start Your Engines
  Who done it? Guilty or not guilty? Who will win the race? Which man will she marry? Will the hero escape, or die trying? Good questions drive good stories...
• Writing Tool #47: Collaboration
  The central act of journalism is reporting, the gathering, verifying and rendering of important information. But don't stifle your imagination. If you think of reporting as only a writer's act, you're missing the big play. A graphic artist who researches a diagram of how a new vaccine works is a reporter. A photographer who captures images from a war zone is a reporter. The designer is a reporter...
• Writing Tool #48: Create An Editing Support Group
  Perhaps the most disabling myth of authorship is that writers practice a lonely craft. There is something romantic about the notion of a writer locked away in a loft overlooking the ocean, his only companions a portable typewriter, a bottle of gin and a kitty named Hemingway...
• Writing Tool #49: Learn from Criticism
  I've saved one of the hardest lessons for near the end. I don't know anyone who enjoys negative criticism, especially of creative work. But such criticism can be priceless — if you learn how to use it. The right frame of mind can transform criticism that is nasty, petty, insincere, biased, even profane, into gold...
• Writing Tool #50: The Writing Process
  In 1983, Donald Murray wrote on a chalkboard a little diagram that changed my writing and teaching forever. It was a modest blueprint of the writing process as he understood it, five words that describe the steps toward creating a story. As I remember them now, the words were: Idea. Collect. Focus. Draft. Clarify. In other words, the writer conceives a story idea, collects things to support it, discovers what the story is really about, attempts a first draft, and revises in the quest for greater clarity...