Action! Action!

Things need to happen in your story or your reader (um...in your case, this may be your teacher) may lose interest.

Practice ramping up the action by changing the underlined verbs in the sentences below.
Here's an example:

Spiderman walked to the store.
Spiderman jumped (or skipped, jogged, biked, swam, flew) to the store.
GET THE IDEA?
Now it's your turn. You can make the sentence longer, too, if you want, like this:
Spideman felt nauseous and threw up on his way to the store.

Mario was sad.

Superman found the bad guys.

Cinderella talked to her fairy godmother.

When the characters in Toy Story 3 were first taken to the preschool, they smiled.

Shaun White stepped on his skateboard, and he went down the street.

Focus





Take a look at both pictures. Both photographers took a shot of a road. In the first one, there are no people, and in the second, we see two people walking.

Decide the focus of your story much like a photographer decides to focus on something in his photo.

Ask yourself:
What is important to you in this picture?
What is important to a reader?
Is it easier to write a story based on the first photo or the second?
What freedom does the first photo give you that the second does not?
Are the people in the second photo characters in your story? What are their names?
Does the black and white photo inspire you to write or does the color one?
Does the color affect the mood of the story you're writing?

Heavy, writerly stuff, eh?

Now....focus, focus, FOCUS!

Spelling Counts

We talked about
DEFINITELY
and
SEPARATELY
and how these words, and others, are often misspelled. (See earlier blog post.)

Here are a few more words that constantly confuse writers. It's your job to look at them and decide which is the correct spelling. Can you do it? I'm trying very hard to trick you!

Febuary or February
library or libary
piece or peice
fourty or forty
ninety or ninty
nickel or nickle
rythm or rhythm
sincerely or sincerly
tommorrow or tomorrow
wierd or weird
stradegy or strategy
surprise or suprise
throughly or thoroughly
lightning or lightning

When the creative juices are flowing and you are in the middle of writing a first draft, don't let the spelling drag you down. If you aren't sure of a word, underline or highlight it, then go back to it. I do this all the time!