There’s a rather prevalent idea in the writer community that you need to write every day – and that if you don’t write every day you’re not a “real writer”. I used to believe that. I don’t anymore.

I understand it, in principle. Making writing a habit means that you don’t waste time waiting for the muse to show up. Writing every day means you have more words (even if they’re bad ones) to work with. And let’s throw in a bit of the 10,000 hour rule, too – the more time you spend writing, the closer you come to expert status (if such a thing exists).

I don’t disagree with the idea on a fundamental level, but I think it is a bit unrealistic. It bases itself on the idea of the solitary writer, in a bubble, separate from the world. It disregards the absolutely irrefutable fact that life happens. And believe me, life does happen. Illness, bereavements, moving, job stress, other commitments… it happens.

So here’s my suggestion. Rather than write every day, let’s say write every day you can. Because when your mother has just passed away, your husband is lying in the high care ward, or you’re just plain exhausted because life, telling yourself you’re not a real writer because you haven’t written today is the opposite of helpful. You make it harder for yourself to deal with what you’re dealing with, and harder to come back to writing with an open heart.

There’s not one writer in the world who hasn’t experienced some sort of upheaval in their writing life, and often that means non-writing days. Maybe one or two, maybe several. Maybe even a couple of weeks or a couple of months. But during that time you are still a writer.

So I’ve been resting this week because last week I was really full-on. I had my usual 8-5 but I was also assisting with the local dance school’s big production. It was a week (and a bit) of early mornings and late nights, buckets of stress, and very little sleep. When the exhaustion finally hit me on Monday night I decided that it was okay to take this break.

And when I start writing again (tomorrow) I, and my writing, will be all the stronger for it.

But Sage! I hear you cry. What about Silk Flower Goodbye?

Fear not, gentle reader. I received some wonderful feedback from my CP, and I’ve been chipping away at the edits just a few minutes at a time. I plan to finalise those, and my front matter, this weekend and have the final file uploaded sometime next week, so I can start looking at *GASP* paperback options.

Pre-orders are still open for the ebook and I’m strongly considering putting the price up after release, so now’s your chance to get it for a mere 1.99 USD (or equivalent in your territory). Current count is 9 and I would really love to get to 15 pre-orders.

Thanks to the lovely Robyn Sarty for mentioning Silk Flower Goodbye in her August newsletter. If you like historical fiction, you can find her at robynsarty.com

Here’s what she said:

Silk Flower Goodbye is a poignant, beautiful, honest, and at times, whimsical look at life, loss, and love.

Friend, I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Do something good for yourself today – whether that’s taking a nap, going for a long walk, or indulging in the hot beverage of your choice. Take care of yourself.

Welcome to Part 3 of “My Stories Under the Microscope” or “MSUM”, where I run 13 of my short stories through Hemingway and take a closer look at the results.

This time it’s all about the passive voice.

First, let’s have a (maybe not so quick) refresher. If you don’t need a refresher, feel free to skip to the next heading!

Passive voice is when the subject of your sentence is being acted upon instead of doing the acting. For example:

“Sage ate the last burger.” is active voice.
“The last burger was eaten by Sage.” is passive voice.
“The last burger was eaten.” is also passive voice.

If you need a trick to help you identify passive voice, try adding “by unicorns” to the sentence (you can replace unicorns with whatever you like, mythical creatures, cryptids, kaiju…) – if it still makes sense, it’s passive voice. “The last burger was eaten by unicorns” = passive voice. [I take no credit for this trick, it was taught to me by my good friend and writing buddy, Robyn Sarty. Thanks Robs!]

The passive voice sentences are completely valid but they do feel a bit limp. The action has already taken place. It has been acted, it has gone to the great theatre in the sky, it is an ex-action. And if you caught that reference, we are destined to be the very best of friends.

In narrative fiction, generally speaking, we want action that is strong and direct. We want boom-boom, not womp-womp.

Passive voice does have its uses: anywhere where the action is more important than the actor (sorry, theatre buds), we want to use passive voice – think historical accounts (“The war was won.”), legal documents (“The motion was denied.”), scientific reports (“The results were recorded.”) etc. It can also be used to avoid or deflect blame. This is a particular favourite trick of politicians.  It acknowledges the action without stating who is responsible or what the solution or follow-up action is.

Remember: both active and passive voice can be used to great effect, but active is generally considered stronger for narrative fiction.

Now that we’re all caught up, let’s take a closer look at my work and the results from Hemingway.

As with adjectives, the “allowable” is proportional to the word count of the piece. Again, it’s not an exact formula but it works out to be roughly 2% of the word count per piece. Looking at the graph, I don’t seem to be terribly guilty of this particular “problem”, but let’s take a closer look at one of my more passive pieces. 

This is an excerpt from Landslide:

If we rewrite the passive “Everything was covered in a haze.” as active “A haze covered everything.”  we get a stronger, more present sentence. I’m kicking myself for not having written it that way in the first place, but if I had we wouldn’t have this example to learn from.

“They couldn’t be returned now.” would also be more impactful in the active voice: “She couldn’t return them now.”

So far, so good. It seems we have a pretty solid case for active being better than passive.

But now take a look at the third highlighted section: “They were ruined.”

This is a great example of a passive sentence which is not improved by being rewritten into active voice, for two reasons. The first is that, while “The rain had ruined them.” is a perfectly good sentence, it is also less simple and less punchy than its passive counterpart. The second is that the active version does not make sense when read with the following sentence: “Like she was.” 

This post has turned out to be about 3x longer than I intended it to be, so I’m going to wrap it here and say that I’ll be back soon with MSUM Part 4 – simpler alternatives to complex sentences. I’m also working on a post about writing with/around mental health issues and/or chronic illness, a topic requested by another dear friend, Richard Bat Brewster.

Stay awesome!

 

Friends, thank you for supporting me through the craziness that was July. I managed to reach my goal of 100 poems for my not-so-secret project, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without your help.

There’s a lot of work still to be done on it, but in the meantime… We have a title! And while we’re revealing that – a cover, too!

*** drum roll ***

silk flower goodbye is available for pre-order now, and will be out on 2 October 2019.

I want to thank everyone who kept me going this past month – Mr Sage, the Clarens Writers, the Wanderimos, the Wishful Inkers, and the Bestexperimates. I don’t want to single anyone out because I am guaranteed to forget someone. If we’ve had any contact recently, just know that I am so completely, utterly thankful to and for you!

CP is on a trip at the moment so I have a little breather before we get into feedback and editing on this project. I should be working on Number 19 (new title TBA when I can think a little more clearly), but I was struck by an inspiration particle on the commute home yesterday and am going to give myself this weekend to work on that before I get back to Number 19 on Monday.

I know, I know. Squirrel mind.

I hope you’ll have a wonderful weekend, wherever you are. Remember that you are loved. Be good, be kind, and stay hydrated! x

Discussing goals with my local writing group on Sunday, I mentioned that I would need to write 42 poems in 9 days (approximately 5 a day) to reach my goal for July. That statement was met with the question “how?” (Well, not exactly, but that was the gist of it – I’ve paraphrased for clarity.)

My answer is this: exactly the same way that you speed-write a novel – knowing that it is an imperfect draft but that the seeds of a great work are there.

When I’m speed-writing these poems, I’m not intending for them to be the final, finished, published work. I am getting down the kernels of the truths I’m trying to write. And once the month is over, I’ll tweak them and polish them. I’ll give them to my CP to read over and feed back on, and I’ll work on something else while I wait for that feedback. We’ll tweak and polish them together.

And then I’ll polish them a little bit more, because that’s what you do.

Some of them are close to what I want already, and won’t need much work. Some of them are so far away that I can’t see what I want with a telescope – but somewhere inside them is something I wanted to say, and that is what I’m doing when I’m penning 100 poems in a month. Well, 80 – I had about 20 before the month began.

It’s not about perfect. It’s about done.