WRITING LESSONS FROM WORLD CUP SOCCER By KIM BRIGGS

What does World Cup Soccer and Writing have to do with each other? On the surface, not much, but I wondered aloud what I should blog about and in my sports family, SOCCER rules.

Hmm, that's interesting. Writing and Soccer? They ARE alike. We dodge passive voice like Renaldo dodges opponents. We shoot on goal. Agents block our queries like US Goalie Tim Howard blocks shots, but if we write and submit like Messi. We fire from our right foot. Recover the blocked shot with our left and fire again. And again. And again.

Occasionally, with hard work and drive and a tenacious streak that won't quit, our relentless shots get through and score.

We can write every day for hours at a time. We can read books from our genres and categories. We can network and tweet and Facebook. We can workshop our manuscripts. We can edit out every cliché and passive voice. We can remove the stiff dialogue. We can round our characters til the cows come home, but at the end of the day, if we don't fire off query after query after query, we will never get that GOAL!

Game on,
Kim

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