Colorado author rewrites her novel to create the most positive book ever written. EJ Thornton took every occurrence of the words ‘no’ and ‘not’ out of her classic story – Angel on Board. By rephrasing common sentences such as ‘Don’t worry’ into ‘Relax,’ and ‘Don’t forget,’ into ‘Remember,’ she completely transformed her original work into an affirmative new creation.
She’s always been keenly aware of the different ‘feel’ words have even when their meanings are essentially the same. Knowing the delivery of the message is as important as the message itself, inspired her to experiment with the novel. The book contains some difficult topics, but it is intended to be a comfort to its readers, so she decided to reduce the stress level of the book by taking out the ‘nots’ and see if she could tell the same, or maybe even a better story.
What started out as an experiment in affirmative language turned into the discovery of astonishing insights such as ‘The word NOT is completely expendable.’ The rephrasing got easier as the work progressed. The 288 page novel had nearly 2000 occurrences of the negative words, but they have all been totally removed.
Worried early on, that the rephrasing might seem contrived, Thornton gave review chapters to people who had read Angel On Board before. They reported back that it was astoundingly better and it even ‘felt’ better to read. Further assured by one reader’s comment, “People rarely miss what’s been omitted,” EJ continued her quest. EJ asked the readers if they could tell where the changes happened, and the readers told her that the changes were seamless.
“The insights were many and quite enlightening about the way we choose words,” EJ says every time she signs one of her books. Because the insights are so rich, she is also making herself available to the speaking circuit to share the positive messages with the public. To find out more about Angel On Board, go to www.AngelOnBoard.com.
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2 comments:
Hi there
Definitely gonna recommend this post to a few friends
how are you?
Great share, thanks for your time
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