November 2015 – Beth Turnage

Chuck Wendig posted his most impossible challenge of all:

Grab 1000 words of your NaNoWriMo work-in-progress (or, really, even if you’re not participating, any WIP of yours), and slap those 1000 words online for all to see.

Eeek. I mean, I’m just not ready to do that. It’s still working, foaming in the vat of writerly inspiration, not quite ready for public inspection. Instead I give you the first thousand words of Forced Labor, which I’m happy with.

I don’t know though. My twenty-eight year old middle son read the first four hundred words and thought it was pretty cool. (I didn’t know he picked up a copy.) But he has been too busy to read the rest of it. How do you get too busy to read your mother’s work? There is no good excuse. Ahem.

Forced Labor (2/3’s of First Chapter)

Arekan sat on his narrow bunk in the bowels of the aging space vessel stitching his forearm. It was a nasty gash, but nothing unusual for him. It would be just one more scar in the litany of scars that scored his body. He winced as he threaded the needle into his flesh, wishing he had liquor in him before he did this.Continue reading Chuck Wendig’s Newest Challenge: First 1,000 Words

According to the study, Success with Style: Using Writing Style to Predict the Success of Novels, by Stony Brook University’s Vikas Gajingunte Ashok, Song Feng and Yejin Choi, whether or not a book will sell can be determined by several quantifiable factors.

The researchers downloaded classic literature from the Project Gutenberg archive, used more recent award-winning novels and analyzed low-ranking books on Amazon — and included genres from science fiction to classic literature and even poetry.

Successful books utilized a high percentage of nouns and adjectives, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, determiners and adjectives. They found that successful books made great use of conjunctions to join sentences (“and” or “but”) and prepositions than less successful books.

Less successful books had a higher percentage of verbs, adverbs, and foreign words. Such books also relied heavily on clichés, extreme and negative words. Less successful books also rely on dull verbs that describe direct action, such as “took,” “promised” and “cried,” while more successful books use more verbs that describe thought-processing, such as “recognized” and “remembered.”Continue reading The Craft of Writing: Lexical Density and You

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