Ten Plots Generated from Other People's Problems

Active verbs slice to the heart of a sentence’s meaning, inject action, make prose dance with precise control. Active verbs cajole, captivate, charm, and compel. They lend the muscularity of manual labor, a scapel’s taxonomic precision, and the graceful sway and bob and glide and jump of a dance.

Seek out active verbs, make them your writerly quest. Enlist them in your cause and they’ll help explain a story’s nuances to a reader. Write them down on your shirt cuffs and use them to goad your sentences into performance, or suck on them in your sleep until each dream is a single verb: swim and replenish and grip.

Use verbs, but treat them kindly. Ride them hard but with the respect they deserve. You will find they reciprocate, and verbs will collect in your pockets like marvelous, multi-colored pebbles you can use to build your story.

Writing exercise: Find three verbs concerned with a particular profession and use them in a sentence that never mentions that profession or its tools. Then think about how that sentence might become a title. Then pick your favorite verb and embroider it on your pillow. Okay, I’m kidding about that last. But think about verbs, let them steep tea-strong in your mind, like catfish in the shadows of a riverbank, capable of flicking their tail and vanishing, leaving only a dark trace.

As some of you know, I started a Patreon campaign about a year ago. It’s worked pretty well, although I still need to put together the first year’s worth in ebook form to send to people.

I’m going to stick with it, particularly given that I get new ideas for short stories all the time (and generate a lot in the course of teaching), but I’m thinking about making some changes.

1. The most important is making it so paid content isn’t just restricted to patrons. I’m going back and forth about this. Right now it feels like a subscription model, but if I go to public content, it seems less so. But what paid patrons would get along with the public posts are sneak peeks at drafts for outside markets, which would be free but accessible only to people supporting the paid stories. The drafts would be early ones, rather than late, and they also wouldn’t be getting paid for, which seems to be the main criteria editors apply to Patreon stories when ruling them out for acceptance. (This is a whole ‘nother long and interesting discussion, I think.)
2. I recently switched from two stories a month to one and I’m going back to two.
3. I need to remove the postcard incentive because I keep forgetting to send them, and figure out something else. Suggestions?

Today’s wordcount: 5476
Current Hearts of Tabat wordcount: 112800
Total word count for the week so far (day 2): 11487
Total word count for this retreat: 42856
Worked on Hearts of Tabat, finished “California Ghosts” and “I am Scrooge”
Time spent on SFWA email, discussion boards, other stuff: an hour

Classes that are coming up soon and still have room! All times are Pacific Time.

• July 15 (Wednesday), 7-9 PM ““ First Pages Workshop Section 1
• July 17 (Friday), 2-4 PM ““ Writing Your Way Into Your Novel, Section 2
• July 19 (Sunday), 9:30-11:30 AM ““ First Pages Workshop Section 2