If you only ever read one article on improving your writing, make it this one.
This is one of the easiest, quickest ways to improve your writing skills.
All it takes is a little… murder.
During the last stream, we went over how to “kill the copula.” The copula is any form of the verb “to be” (am, are, is, was, were, be, been, being, etc.)
Using the copula every now and then is fine, but overuse can lead to bland writing. And forcing yourself to stay away from it is the writing equivalent of lifting weights.
You can see the full exercise here,
or scroll down for the quick outline.
1) Describing things using the copula (especially when done often), leads to bland writing.
- There were a lot of old men in the room. (Boring)
- Her t-shirt was too big. (Boring)
- A mirror is on the wall. (Boring)
2) You can easily spice up your writing by killing the copula: re-phrasing the sentences so that they use a different action verb instead.
- Old men filled every inch of the room with their wrinkly bodies.
- The oversized t-shirt hung loose and baggy on her small frame.
- A mirror stands like a sentry on the wall.
In general, not using the copula makes your writing more interesting to read because it forces you to be more vivid. When you drop the copula, you have to be more specific and detailed to convey the same information, which makes for fun reading.
3) Just be careful not to use other “weak verbs” like have, look, get, etc. instead of the copula. They are often just as boring.
- The party had a lot of old men. (Boring)
- Her t-shirt looks too big. (Boring)
- The wall’s got a mirror on it. (Boring)
Be sure to check out the video for some more great examples that chat came up with. There were some amazing copula-less sentences that were on fire!
After that, chat voted that we write a story with these four stipulations: (1) No copulas, because that’s the theme of the day; (2) every sentence has to have a number in it; (3) the main character had to be a fish person; (4) all the characters are anime girls who stutter.
Somehow, we managed to make it all work! Personally, I love the characters we came up with. Each of them is a different anime girl trope, and each has a different name for a mathematical constant or large number.
Here’s what we came up with:
Angela the Anglerfish leaped into the air with her human legs and slashed the beast with her coral sword, hitting it critically for 9,999 points of lethal damage. It disappeared in a flash of thousands of tiny pixels.
For the first time since she’d started playing Fish Fantasy, the latest MMORPG craze where you could battle enemies as your favorite fish, Angela had her first one-hit kill.
Angela stood back and brushed her angler-light out of her fish eyes with a one-handed swish. Behind her stood her four companions.
“I h-h-hate you so much,” groaned Octillion the octopus, crossing all eight of her tentacles across her chest.
“You f-f-f-fought so awe-awe-awe-aweso-some-awe-some … really good!” squealed Planck Constant the pufferfish, swelling with joy and smiling.
“W-whatever,” grumbled her sister Avogrado Constant, staying her shriveled up pufferfish self.
“You’ve r-r-really leveled up!” said Pi the magical pike, waving her star-shaped wand. “I think we’re ready to go to the Level One Hundred Tower.”
“L-l-level one hundred?!” Angel shrieked. “But I don’t even h-h-have the n-n-number one weapons yet.”
“Don’t worry,” said Pi, doing a sparkly dance. “You have the Infinity Fin.”
“Sure,” Angela said, taking the Infinity Fin out of her inventory and staring at its yellow, red, and brown splendor, “but we don’t even know what it does yet!”
“You wouldn’t know, you big d-d-dummy,” grumbled Octillion.
“I’m sure it will come in h-h-han-hand-hand-h-h-hand … be a big help on our adventure!” squeaked Planck Constant.
“Whatever,” her sister Avogrado Constant groaned. “Let’s just go already, I have crap to do in like thirty minutes.”
The five of them bravely fought their way through the Level 100 tower, slaughtering uncountable anime fish until they reached the very top. They broke into the hundredth chamber, the final one, weapons ready to battle with whatever boss fish awaited them.
What they saw, they’d never expected in a million years.
Scottina the Shark sat on his throne of thousands of fish skeletons, shoving his fins into buckets of screaming winstons, shoveling them into his mouth, crunching on their bones, wiping their scales and flakes off on the pink tutu around his waist.
“F-f-f-ive against one?” Scottina bellowed when she saw the girls. “Let’s see how you fare when your team is half the size!”
Without any warning, and with the girls still shocked by the sight, Scottina grabbed two of them in her massive fins. Planck Constant and Avogadro Constant struggled to escape his grasp, but they couldn’t move an inch.
“Oh n-n-no,” squealed Planck Constant, “she will d-d-dev-dev-our-dev-devo … eat us!”
“Ugh, whatever,” mumbled Avogrado Constant.
Scottina cruinched down on them for 99,999 damage, more than Angela even thought possible. The two of them vanished in a haze of pixels.
“No one p-p-picks on my friends except me!” yelled Octillion, wielding a energy blade in each of her tentacles. She leaped at Scottina, brandishing all eight of them, but just before she struck an attack, Scottina dodged out of the way, and all her swords plunged into the wall behind her. Octillion struggled to pull them out, but in that one moment of distraction, Scottina came up from behind and chomped her away, fizzling her to bits in a single crunch.
“Angela!” cried Pi, waving her magical wand to cast a shield over them. “You n-n-need to use the Infinity Fin!”
Angela looked at the three-sided fin in her hand, still sparkling brown, yellow and red.
“But we have zero clue what it does!” Angela said. “It m-m-might even make the situation a billion times worse.”
Pi shrugged. “Even if it’s a one in a m-million, it’s worth a shot!”
Scottina slammed down her fist on the shield Pi had summoned, shattering it to pieces. She swooped in for the kill, crushing Pi between her thousands of teeth in a single bite. She then turned to Angela, her final victim.
“The other four tasted all right,” she said through clenched knifelike teeth. “But I’m hoping that m-m-m-my fifth snack really hits the spot.”
As she opened his mouth to crunch through all of Angela’s hit points, Angela closed her eyes, held up the Infinity Scale, and activated it.
Immediately a bright light filled up one-hundred percent of the room, from floor to ceiling. It blinded both Angela and Scottina for one moment, but then when the light faded and they looked back, something had changed.
The Infinity Fin had transformed … into a pizza!
The brown had turned into crust, the red into sauce, and the yellow into a bright neon cheese, all three ingredients glowing in the tastiest way imaginable.
“W-w-w-wauw,” Scottina honked, eyeing the pizza with two sparkling eyes. He immediately lunged for the slice and gobbled it up in less than two seconds. But just as he swallowed it down, not even one moment later, a new fresh slice appeared.
Angela suddenly realized what secret the Infinity Fin had been holding all this time: infinity pizza. And, a hundred times more importantly, she knew how to defeat Scottina.
“If you eat m-m-me, then I will disappear, along with this delicious infinity pizza,” she said to Scottina. “B-b-b-but, I’ll make you the best deal you’ve heard in a thousand years. If you s-s-s-stop eating all of the fish on this server, then I’ll trade the pizza to you, and you can eat all the p-p-p-pizza you want, 24 hours a day 7 days a week.”
“Deal!” Scottina said, not even one second later. The infinity pizza hovered over to her possession and disappeared into her inventory. As soon as it did, Scottina vanished in a cloud of pixels, and then a screen came up showing the 9,999,999 experience points that Angela had gained from beating her.
Angela breathed a sigh of relief, put her two hands up to her head, and removed her virtual reality helmet.
Suddenly she returned to her real-life room with her four friends, all of them already with their helmets off and eating pizza.
“G-g-g-ood news, everyone!” Angela said to the four of them. “I b-b-beat Scottina with the infinity pizza.”
“You did so in-in-in-incr-incred-ib-in-inc … great!” said Patty, also known as Planck Constant.
“Ugh, d-d-don’t expect me to praise you or anything,” said Olivia, also known as Octillion.
“I knew you could do it!” said Pearl, also known as Pi.
“W-w-whatever,” grumbled Amy, also known as Avogadro Constant. She clutched herself with her two arms and shivered. “Anyway, now that we’re d-d-done with that, can we turn up the goddamn thermostat to 60 so we can s-s-stop stuttering!”
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 6:30pm-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon,
forthcoming March 2019.
Featured image: Pakutaso (Edited by me)