Hello everyone! I’m posting from the KenTen Writers Retreat this week, and we are having a great time. If you haven’t had the chance to attend a writing retreat, I would highly recommend going. Beautiful settings, useful classes, and great networking with other authors.
Today, we have author Ada Brownell with us for Wisdom Wednesday. Welcome, Ada!
Name: Ada Brownell
Genre: Historical Romantic Suspense
Latest Novel: Love’s Delicate Blossom
Writing Tip:
Whether you are writing fiction or non-fiction use: ACTIVE VOICE; DETAILS; MOTION. Those three things are like a video camera picking up a scene. It’s happening now. Faces, hands, even feet have distinctive details. The camera always follows whatever moves.
ACTIVE VOICE uses action verbs:
“Henry Hunter, his bad eye shut, pointed (not was pointing) his gun, and a bullet zinged (not ‘was zinging’) through the wall beside her, splintering wood. (This would be better if this was a short sentence by itself and WOOD as the subject like this: “Wood splintered.”) She froze where she stood (not she was standing still). Her legs trembled (not her legs were trembling). Her heart ca-thumped (not her heart was beating wildly) against her ribs.”
DETAILS
The barn door widened. His shadow crept across the straw-littered floor.
The tip of the gun barrel came through the door first. His head followed slowly, like the moon rising at night. His eyes stared ahead. She raised the shovel and then came down on the man’s head like she’d done with a hoe many times to kill a rattlesnake. Metal rang like she’d hit a rock, jolting her body.
MOTION
Henry landed at her feet, lids open, eyes glassy. His gun flew up and crashed in a fresh cow pie.
An excellent example of using active voice! And I love how you reminded us to think of writing like a video playing a scene.
Favorite Writing Tip for New Writers:
Read what you hope to write. Look at the first paragraph, often called the “lead” or “hook.” Use your own idea and story, and start it in a similar way as your pattern. Continue analyzing the article or book, writing from your own storehouse of ideas and knowledge, creating characters through description, mannerisms, actions,dialogue, reactions. Include physical reactions such as pain, muscle response, and the five senses—like your model writer probably does.
I can’t echo enough how important it is to read the genre that you want to write. Don’t stop reading!
Edmund Pritchett III wants to marry Ritah Irene O’Casey, but his intended has just begun her fight for the future. The beautiful redhead stands between Henry Hunter and Tulip, the orphan girl he kidnapped to work in his brothel, and he’s not giving up.
Excited about being one of the few women to go to college in 1917, Ritah hopes to become a teacher who can help widows keep their children when tragedy strikes. She also wants to enable mothers to know more about prevention and treatment of disease, in an era when few have access to a doctor. Instead, she ends up fighting for the lives of injured soldiers in a World War I Army health clinic, and finds her own life threatened by illness as well as sorrow.
When Ritah takes a teaching job, Joe Nichols, a handsome farmer edges his way into her heart. But Edmund Pritchett III isn’t giving up, and neither is Henry Hunter.
Will Ritah be able to continue to fight for women and families, understand enduring love, decide on the man she loves, and defend herself and her students when Henry Hunter bursts into the school shooting a pistol?
COMMENT FROM A READER: Your book set a tone and world from your grandmother’s time, the historical elements are what readers read the genre for.
A redhead and the eighth child in her family, Ada Brownell looks at things from a different angle. Ever thought about what’s in a fertilized egg? She knows when she eats her breakfast egg, there’s the DNA for feathers, the rooster’s crow, the scratchy feet, the capacity to grow, walk, peck, fly short distances, digest food, and even create eggs and other chickens. So when Ada wrote Love’s Delicate Blossom, she took a good look at peach flowers and noticed they’re as amazing as an egg. The most important thing in a blossom is life, if it’s still attached to the tree. That’s just the beginning of the awesome blossom. Love also is a living substance, born, nurtured, and sometimes everlasting.
Ada is the author of nine books, fiction and non-fiction that reflect her brand: Stick-to-Your-Soul Encouragement. She has written hundreds of articles and stories for Christian publications, and even more news articles when she worked as a journalist at The Pueblo Chieftain, the last seven years as a medical writer.
She’s been married sixty-five years, has five children (one in heaven), nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Ada has played the piano or organ for churches, sang in choirs, trios, as a soloist; plus taught church youth about twenty-five years.
Social Media Links:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/AdaBrownellWritingMinistries
Twitter: @adabrownell
Amazon Ada Brownell author page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KJ2C06
Google https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AdaBrownell/posts
Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1654534.Ada_Brownell
Blog: http://inkfromanearthenvessel.blogspot.com
Before you go, make sure to connect with Ada on social media and check out her newest release, Love’s Delicate Blossom.
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