Then I vividly describe what I saw and how I felt in that moment so you could experience it as well. My first sentence tells you a big lightning strike shook my home, and the 2nd sentence describes what it sounded like. Why? Because the focus was on what you were doing before the amazing thing happened…when you should have been giving me detail about what you were seeing, hearing, and feeling. So for that part of the story, I chose “deafening soundwave” to describe the moment.Īnother thing I want you to see about my sample- I told you what was happening right off the bat with, “a thundering explosion of electricity…shook my entire home.” Several of you waited until the very last line to tell me about the amazing thing you saw, and that actually defeated the purpose of the entire exercise. The thunder sounded like a massive explosion…and then it lingered for a number of seconds. I was also very careful to pick the best possible words to illustrate what I was seeing and feeling when that lightning bolt hit.įor instance, I could have said the thunder made a “loud boom” or a “thundering noise”. If you look closely, I was very careful not to repeat any of the main keywords that defined the story. I was talking about a lightning storm – but how many times did I use the word “lightning” to get my point across? Make sense? Additionally, I want you to take a look at my sample one more time. Novice writers waste so much space getting to the actual point that it dilutes everything else that’s there. Other samples repeated phrases like, “I looked at my friend and said…” That’s just wasting words when you could be sharing something a lot more important, which is a big problem I see with iWriter assignments as well. Think about this- those intros are between 11 and 28 words long…when you have 100 total words to tell an exciting story. “If I live to be 100 years old, I don’t think I will ever see anything as amazing as what I saw one time on vacation…”.“The most amazing thing I ever saw was one day when…”.That’s why I literally picked apart and studied every single word that was used- I packed in as much as I could in 82 words without sacrificing the writing quality.Ī lot of the samples I received opened with things like. I also wanted to tell you about a number of trees that were scorched, how my pool equipment exploded and a number of other cool details, but there was no way to accomplish that in 100 words.
I remember telling her, “If you’re not already dead, there’s no sense in running now.” For me to use that part of the experience though, I would have had to tie up extra words tying my wife into the narrative. Her first reaction was to jump up and run inside the house, which actually made me laugh.
For example, my wife was sitting with me on the porch when the lightning struck. I had to leave out so much detail in the paragraph above because it just wouldn’t fit. As you might have learned from completing this exercise, it is very difficult to tell a story in 100 words.
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