This week: Lifeless Verbs Kill Characters Edited by: Brooke  
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“Amy is a Sharpie; she's passionate.”
― Caroline Kepnes, Hidden Bodies
“He walked slowly across the room."
Colorless verbs do nothing to advance your story. I'm not one of those authors who say kill all the adverbs, but I will say most of them are useless and just clog up potential good writing.
“He paced across the room,” says more because it gives your character action. It creates a visual.
When a writer consistently uses unnecessary “to be” verbs, the writing can sound dull. Strong verbs push a motionless noun into action, instead of just sitting there like a clump of letters. Flat writing is boring and can cause your reader to lose interest, skim the story and sometimes abandon it entirely. As a writer, it's our job to learn to use stronger, more expressive verbs for basic “to be” forms of verbs. This will make your writing more effective.
How can you revise your sentences to eliminate unnecessary “to be” (inactive) verbs?
 Use your word processor's "find" process to search for forms of “to be” verbs in your writing such as: is, am, was, were, being, been, etc.
Who or what is performing the action in your sentences? Make that person or thing the subject of your sentence.
Substitute more expressive words for the “to be” verbs to enforce the action performed.
 Try to avoid beginning sentences with "It is", "There is", or "There are".
Try to avoid the use of present progressive verb forms beginning with is.
Don’t go overboard. Don't use 'quarter' words when a dime or nickel word will do that trick. That's not what I am advocating. I'm saying make your writing the best it can be. Don't allow your words to stumble when it can strut proudly across the page.
Write and Review on! ~ Brooke
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I received some wonderful feedback from my last newsletter [#9870] "Mixed Reviews" and I'm proud to share it with you.
From eyestar~* 
Wow! I enjoyed this commentary! Right ON! Everything is POV and we all have them. 
From Paul 
I never read reviews of anything but my work. I read and appreciate every one of those I get. Each is a lesson in the craft. If I can be more skillful I want to know and I appreciate being told. It is a real pain having to learn about punctuation at 77.
Reading or listening to reviews is like listening to politicians and preachers, each has an opinion, but each wear blinders, seeing whatever work only through their personal like/dislike filters, and none have any sense of reality. Very narcissistic behavior, it’s too bad that’s the worlds biggest problems now, with all the nationalistic behavior being thrown around no one cares for the other person any longer.
I’m quite capable of deciding if I liked the work. I’ve known many people that only read Readers Digest books and magazines. Several said, “There are too many words, I forget and get lost.” These we’re not members of Mensa.
I’ve never appreciated Pablum.
Thank you for your newsletter. I appreciate the effort you put into it.
Paul
🐸
From BIG BAD WOLF is Merry 
"Villains By Necessity" by Eve Forward, is a 1995 Fantasy book about how, after the War of Good Versus Evil ended in Good's favor, only for the forces of Good to go overboard, and try to remove all traces of Evil, which turns out to be disastrous, and now it's up to a group of left-over villains to save the day by releasing Evil back into the world - I love this book enough to the point I have my local library $30 in order for them to buy it. This is because it suffered from the curse of being out-of-print, and I didn't like the idea of paying $2 for them to order it from another library halfway across the country just for me to read it - I have since checked it out/renewed it over 15 times over the past year and a half.
Anyways, luckily for those of you who use Kindle and Audible, this book has been released onto those formats since 2018. Anyways, recently, I was looking at the reviews, and one of them is like "The publishing date says '2018' but this sounds more like something written in the 90's." I'd like to say to that person "The book was written in 1995, so thus, yes, it was written in the 90's." But, one can't reply to posts on Amazon, that I know of.
From Dhyana
Loved the reviews! An inkling into my thinking...LOL
From hbk16
I so hope to review books here on w.com.
Indeed a review is a sort of opinion. Authors should accept different reviews at the moment reviews are respectful and objective.
This is a featured issue that needs further debates.
From Beholden 
Receiving reviews is like anything else - one learns as one goes along. I've been in WdC six months now and already I know which reviewers to respect and listen to, which to enjoy and forget, and which to ignore completely. Seems an awful thing to say but it's necessary for self preservation.
And I love your quote from Mark Twain! Trust him to get it absolutely right.
Beholden
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Noticing Newbies: December 11, 2019 Issue [#9911]
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