April LUW Meeting

Announcements

·         Terron James has been re-elected as the president of the League of Utah Writers Tooele Chapter.

·         Melanie is writing the newsletter for Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers. They are having a week long conference at Waterford school June 18-22nd. Visit http://www.WIFYR.com for more details.

Meeting

This week Terron shared the most valuable things he took from his 5000 college course on creative writing.

There are two major things that are important in a writer’s career -

1. Writers need to fail over and over again

2. We need to learn to fit more story into less space.

To teach us how to fit more story into less space Terron gave us an example of two different stories. The first was basic. Wake up, get out of bed, go to lagoon, etc. The second one, while still short, was much more exciting due to the powerful adjectives used.

When writing there is no need to be too general. Stories should be very specific; making sure the words are active. Adverbs (ly words) should also be avoided. i.e. 'smashed on the floor' vs. 'fell from its place' or 'crawled' vs. 'slowly'

Make sure you are writing consistently and failing often so that you can have room to improve. Welcome criticism -- we can't learn to fix our mistakes if we never fail.

Other tips

·         Be consistent in your writing and let others critique you.

·         Your writing is only as good as the best book you've read in the last six months.

·         Avoid clichés like 'A Twinkle in the eye' and 'run for your life'

·         Avoid dialogue tags such as 'he laughed' or 'she screamed' try avoid tagging altogether when possible and only use 'he said' 'she said' to identify the speaker.

    Thank you Terron for continuing to lead our group for the next two years!
    And thanks to J.A. Bennett for this blog update!!!!!