Thursday, March 3, 2016

Building On That Writing







My  youngest has a state writing test coming up, so we been swamped with lots of writing material lately.  Most of the material deals with ways to expand sentences by adding details.  Over the past few months, we've done several writing exercises and have even made up our own silly games. One of our favorite games is to take a simple sentence and pile on the details.

For example, here's my favorite one he wrote.

It's not -

The man cooked.

But -

The big, sweaty, hairy man leaned over his pot of chili and stirred the beans as sweat dripped down his chin and into the pot.

Yuck!

He's pretty proud of that one and I guess I am too.  Sadly, now everything is big, sweaty, and hairy. 

Here's another similar one - the WHO, WHAT, and WHY game.

Example:

WHO:   Collin picked strawberries.
WHAT: Collin picked a bucket full of strawberries.
WHY:   Collin picked a bucket full of strawberries to share with his friends.

Hopefully all this writing will make my little one a stronger one and me too.  When I am editing I tend to go back and add more detail, but I like the idea of playing the WHO, WHAT, WHY game.  This last game might help me clarify my writing to my readers.  I often know what I am talking, so sometimes I forget the readers may get confused if I leave out too much detail.

Another thing I like to do is thing about the five senses and add those into my story.  See, piling on more detail.

 So what secrets do you have to building onto your writing?  As a writer and a mom, I'd love to hear some more fun ideas.

Well, time to get back to building.  Happy Writing.

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