Hats, Boots, & Chocolate

    It has come to my attention that there are many in the writing community who haven't the faintest clue what passive voice is. In this blog post, I will clear up what passive voice is, what it is not, and when and how to use it, based on the information I have gotten from the book "Writing Tools" by Roy Peter Clark.     Note also that there is a difference between passive voice  and passive verbs , but that is a discourse that I will leave to Mr. Clark, as he has more experience and more eloquence than I do. But do recognize that, while I'll give a basic overview of passive voice, if you really want an understanding of all the parts that go into it, you'd be best served reading Mr. Clark's book.     So, what is passive voice? To put it as simply as possible, the difference between active and passive voice is whether or not the subject of a given clause is acting or being acted upon--and because it's based on clauses, a sentence can contain both acti...

     I tried/have been trying an experiment lately where I used ChatGPT during my brainstorming process for a completely new project, just to see how well it would do. It's terrible for coming up with a coherent plot--it forgets a lot of the things it just wrote out and starts to contradict itself--but for the story seed I used, it was perfect, because I've been doing research on that idea to figure out how it might work in a story for years, and never found anything that gave me a decent starting point for it. (It's a music-based magic system, but every previous attempt at designing it I'd tried, it became far too complex for me to write into a story, at least with my abilities as a novelist. ChatGPT gave me the best idea of what something like that could look like without being too complex for me to write, which was a perfect jumping-off point for me to then have the AI take me through a couple possible plot-threads, which I then unraveled and wove into my own plot-st...

    About a month ago, I adopted a goldfish from the preschool where I've been student teaching. His water was pretty scummy and he wasn't really eating, and the regular teachers at the site didn't have the time to take care of him as well as they wanted, and my head teacher mentioned that she'd been thinking about flushing him.     I, however, am a wee bit of an animal-lover, and while I'd never had a fish before, I couldn't bear the thought of flushing the poor little guy--he'd done nothing to earn that treatment. So I offered to take him home--a process that involved dumping him into the preschool sink by accident, then hurriedly scooping him into a plastic bag full of water and putting him in a little paper cup to give his water some structure so he'd have a bit of space to swim in. Then he got to hang out in the car and slosh around for thirty minutes while I drove home, and after that he had to survive living in a quart jar for a week while I order...

    I mostly wrote this to help myself figure out what the best principle for writing is for myself, but I decided that there was some value in this spiel that others might appreciate. Enjoy!      The most important part of a story, in my opinion, is the characters—the characters, their arcs, their relationships, their interactions within those relationships, their traumas, their challenges, their dilemmas, their choices, the consequences of their actions, their thoughts, feelings, and emotions, their conflicts, their hopes and dreams, their fears, their doubts, their worries, the lies they tell themselves, the truths they have to teach their writers and their readers. Everything else in a story—the plot, the setting, the action, the prose—all of it is supplemental, and exists solely to support the characters' growth, arcs, and journeys.     Some characters, like Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings, have to go on fourteen-month journeys to find ou...

    If you're having any struggles, successes, or anything else you want to share about your writing, feel free to drop them in the comments here! :)

    I was talking with my sister and her husband the other day, and we hit on an idea that I hadn't thought about much before, so I wanted to share it here and get some other folks' thoughts.     Have you ever thought about how, in America's more and more individualistic culture, there are a lot of people who all look really similar in the way they act and dress? Take a high school, for example: even to an uninitiated person like me who doesn't care much about school politics, when I was walking the halls of the high school, I still knew about which cliques different people belonged to based on how they dressed and acted. I couldn't have told you what the cliques were, but had you lined up a bunch of kids in the school I think I could have worked out with reasonable  confidence which ones were in similar groups.     My brother-in-law suggested that perhaps part of the reason why this is is because of the way we're taught to make friends. I've been work...