Word Count

I'm still in school so capping writing is important.  I don't usually have a word count, but I usually have a page limit.  This summer as I write scholarship and college essays, I've encountered my worst limit of all - the word count.  Sure, as a writer, I've faced that but before, but some of these essays want no more than 250 words.  Ugh!  Good news it really has made me focus on my word choices.  Thus my tip this month if you tend to be wordy is to write essays with a 250 cap.  Once you get used to the pain, it is kind of fun!

Write a book by writing letters.

I have posted this tip before - when writing pretend to write to someone you know - by the way, this was one of Stephen King's ideas.  The idea is that writing a letter can help you keep the audience in mind and really connect with them.  Pretty neat trick, eh?!

Well, over the past year, I've come across a few examples of this and thought the books were pretty cool. Perhaps the best example I've seen of this is so far was in the children's book, Unusual Chickens For The Exceptional Poultry Farmer by Kelly Jones.

This book was a fun read and was written entirely out of a series of a few letters. I really enjoyed the freshness of this book and others like it.   Hmm, maybe these writers on to something.  Can't wait to try it out now!!!

Happy writing . . . and of course reading!

National Poetry Month!!!

As a way to celebrate National Poetry Month, I've been posting quick poetry lectures online for my students (flipping my classroom a bit), and I'm finding that the more I read poetry out loud, the more lyrical my prose writing becomes (still not as lyrical as I'd like, of course, but better). Anyway...I encourage you all to celebrate in your own way, but I highly recommend that it is out loud and often. You just might be surprised at the euphonious results that trickle down into your own writing.

Here is a link to one of my ridiculous video lectures on Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (an interpretation for high school students where I am sure to add a side note they rightfully mocked about not taking heroin) in case anyone has that much time on his hands. :).


XOXO
--Lauren
aka Miss M.

Villain of the Month: Past Tense, "Um," "Because," and a Sandwich? (The Speech Patterns of Villains)

After reading an admissions essay by James Holmes onScribd.com, I was frustrated that I couldn’t see any real foreshadowing markers to the horrible real-life villain he would become, and began to wonder if there were any markers of villainy in speech. Then I pulled up journal entries and the like from the Columbine murderers compiled by acclaimed journalist Dave Cullen (author of Columbine). The intimate writings are great resources, and well worth a read to pick up on nuance and cadence.

In furthering my research, I hit specificity jackpot.  I found some researchers (Jeffrey T. Hancock, Michael T. Woodworth and Stephen Porter) asking and answering the same linguistic question. What a great tool for making seating charts, navigating blind dates, and –most importantly – crafting the dialogue of a villain! Their analysis was focused on psychopaths and non-psychopaths talking about homicide, but I think that there are trends that may work really well for writing psychopathic characters even when not talking about homicide. Their findings were as follows:

1.      “Psychopaths (relative to their counterparts) included more rational cause and-effect descriptors (e.g., ‘because’, ‘since’).” Such an easy add to writing, and psychologically fascinating because it shifts the blame to the universe or the victim, and away from the villain. In writing a psychopath villain, keeping the mindset of universe-blame might be as valuable as the use of peppering the aftermath of one of his crimes with “because” and since.”

2.      “[Psychopaths] focused on material needs (food, drink, money), and contained fewer references to social needs (family, religion/spirituality).” Ooooh…how many chilly scenes can we reference of villains eating a victim’s sandwich or complaining about the sound of the air conditioning in the height of a killing? Tarrantino, the Cohen brothers, and the like know the balance of the horrific and mundane trick all too well. Who knew they were mirroring the linguistic patterns of psychopaths so perfectly?

3.      “Psychopaths’ speech contained a higher frequency of disfluencies (‘uh’, ‘um’) indicating that describing such a powerful, ‘emotional’ event to another person was relatively difficult for them.” Yikes! If saying “um” is a sign of psychopathy, I’m in trouble, but it seems that these disfluencies are at a time when others are talking about emotions. Not only can the “uh’s” help you craft a psychopath’s language, but may also help you linguistically show the difficulty one of your characters may have with a topic other than emotions or murder.

4.      “Psychopaths used more past tense and less present tense verbs in their narrative, indicating a greater psychological detachment from the incident, and their language was less emotionally intense and pleasant.” Interesting! Linguistically pushing events away from them/their crime by using time. Very sneaky. And an easy tool for mimicking a psychopath’s dialogue/line of thinking.

And for a final link on how to craft the psychopath’s language, the FBI used the findings listed above as part of a training on “The Language of Psychopaths” – an excellent article by the researchers listed above as well as a slew of other big-name experts in the field.