By Ashley Lister
\u00a0I can\u2019t remember if I\u2019ve shared this before or not but it\u2019s always worth revisiting. My favourite writing exercise is the swifty. What, you might ask, is a swifty? (other than a rather awkward rephrasing of the term \u2018quickie\u2019). According to Merriam Webster a \u2018Swifty is a play on words taking the form of a quotation ascribed to Tom and followed by an adverb. Here’s a good example: \u201cThe thermostat is set too high,\u201d said Tom heatedly.\u2019
The form takes its name from the main character (Tom Swift) in a series of adventure books ascribed to the authorship of Victor Appleton. In the series Appleton was meant to have a weakness for adverbs, attaching an excess of them to dialogue in order to add colour and variety to the narration.
\u201cI\u2019ve got a knife,\u201d said Tom sharply.
\u201cGet to the back of the boat,\u201d said Tom sternly.
\u201cI like the herb you\u2019ve used for seasoning,\u201d said Tom sagely.
I like these because, as a writing exercise, they\u2019re a fun diversion from the seriousness of writing, they allow a little bit of silliness into the otherwise formal world of fiction writing, and they teach a valuable lesson about the way the artifice of some adverbial tags can distract a reader from the content of dialogue.
\u201cBaa,\u201d said Tom, sheepishly.
\u201cI have a thing for redheads,\u201d said Tom, gingerly.
\u201cHave you ever tried figging?\u201d asked Tom, gingerly.
It\u2019s a relatively easy exercise \u2013 simply write a swifty \u2013 but it is a liberating process that reminds us of the fragile balance between dialogue creation and speech presentation. I\u2019d love to see your examples of swifties in the comments box below.
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By Ashley Lister \u00a0I can\u2019t remember if I\u2019ve shared this before or not but it\u2019s always worth revisiting. My favourite writing exercise is the swifty. What, you might ask, is a swifty? (other than a rather awkward rephrasing of the term \u2018quickie\u2019). According to Merriam Webster a \u2018Swifty is a play on words taking the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2486],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/erotica-readers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16196"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/erotica-readers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/erotica-readers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erotica-readers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erotica-readers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16196"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/erotica-readers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16199,"href":"https:\/\/erotica-readers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16196\/revisions\/16199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erotica-readers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erotica-readers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erotica-readers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16196"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erotica-readers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=16196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}