For Creative Writing

1. • Please come in and pick your seats. Pick them carefully, as your seats
will form the new seating chart.
• Writing prompt:
Remember that writing is an act of telepathy. On a single sheet of
paper, please describe what you look like. Be specific. Beam a hologram
of your appearance from your mind to the reader’s. At the end of your
description, please write your new seat number (10 minutes).

2. Active Voice
• Verbs come in two types: active and passive.
• With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something.
Professor Binns peered at Hermione as though he had never seen a student
properly before.
• With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The
subject is just letting it happen.
Hermione was peered at by Professor Binns as though he had never seen a student
properly before.
AVOID THE PASSIVE TENSE!
Creepy

3. King’s Examples (paragraph 5, handout)
Passive Voice
My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with
Shayna was begun.
Active Voice
My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I’ll never forget it.

4. Practice Active Voice
With a partner, rewrite these sentences in active voice (5 min)
• The jar is filled with sand.
• Reading is enjoyed by Mary.
• The town was destroyed by fire.
• The room will be cleaned by John every Saturday.
• Cheese was eaten by Sara.
• Why was the road crossed by the chicken?
• The metropolis has been scorched by the dragon’s fiery breath.
• A number of things are indicated by these results.

5. The Adverb is Not Your Friend
• Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They usually end
in –ly.
• According to King, adverbs reveal a writer’s fear that s/he is not
expressing her/himself clearly.
He closed the door firmly.
He conquered the mountain triumphantly.
She twirled her hair absent-mindedly. }You can probably infer, or
make a logical guess, the
manner in which the
character acted based on
the surrounding text.