Writing Tips: Quotes From Writers

 

"Don't force a scene or a line." (Peggy Aultman)

"Get ideas from your own life." (Peggy Aultman)

"Read your writing again after it's cold." (Howard Nichols)

"Listen to what other people say about your writing. You can learn from them." (Howard Nichols)

"Poetry is painting pictures with words." (David Schoen)

"The best poetry comes from your own experience." (David Schoen)

 

Writing Tips: Creating Voice in Nonfiction Writing

"Sound like yourself." (Kurt Vonnegut)

"When I talk about voice, I mean written words that carry with them the sense that someone has actually written them. Not a committee, not a computer, but a single human being. Writing with voice has the same quirky cadence that makes human speech so impossible to resist listening to. (Ralph Fletcher)

 

Writing Tips: Showing Not Telling (How not to sound like an encyclopedia)

 

National Geographic

Turtles poured out of the surf in wave after wave through the darkness. Heaving, huffing, gasping, turtles plowed the coarse black sand with their noses, laboring onto shore. On the rain-soaked October night, possibly 30000 Olive Ridley Sea Turtles were converging on a half-mile of Pacific Beach at Ostinal, Costa Rica, in a biological extravaganza called la arribada, the arrival.

Following insticts that scientists have not begun to understand, the turtles had gathered offshore for mating and now hoards of females were swimming to this particular beach to lay eggs. By 2 a.m. the beach looked like a cobblestone street where the cobblestones had come to life. And still more turtles were comming. They collided and piled up in jams. They filled the air with the soft sound of flippers hollowing their nests in the sand and a rhythmic thump thump thump as turtles that had finished laying rocked their 80-pound bodies to pack sand over their eggs. (Rudloe and Rudloe, 1994,1997)

 

World Book Encyclopedia (1996)

There are at least seven specific species of sea turtles. Six of them- the green turtle, the flatback, the hawksbill, the loggerhead, the Atlantic ridley, and the Pacific ridley- have boney scut-covered shells...

Female sea turtles do not normally leave the water, except to lay their eggs. The females often migrate thousands of miles or kilometers to reach their breeding beaches. they drag themselves onto a sandy beach, lay their eggs, and then return to sea.

 

Wrtier's Tips: A Meeting With Mrs. Bunt Percy (Wife of Walker Percy) and Dr. Howard Nichols.

Read a lot.

Write a lot.

Have someone criticize your work.

Leave it for a while, then come back to it with a fresh mind.

Keep a journal to get ideas.

Apprecitate what you read.

 

Works Cited:

Mrs. Bunt Percy, personal interview.

Dr. Howard Nichols, personal interview.

Mrs. Peggy Aultman, personal interview.

Mr. David Schoen, personal interview.

Harvey, Stephanie. Nonfiction Matters. Stenhouse Publishers, 1998.

Fletcher, Raplh.What a Writer Needs. Heinmann, 1993.