Francine Prose wrote a fine book about writing, Reading Like a Writer, which includes a chapter on Sentences. (Chapters are titled with names such as Words, Paragraphs, Narration, Character, Gesture, Dialogue, and more.) In her book, she celebrates the sentence and crafting wonderful ones. To talk about sentences is to have a conversation about something […]
National Novel Writing Month is November, a time when hundreds of thousands of authors make a public promise to write 50,000 words during 30 days. The contest amounts to writing just about anything in a file that grows to that size and sending it off to the NaNo website for your "certificate." There are quotes […]
Sooner or later you'll hear about writers using Scrivener. It's a writing tool that makes projects flow faster and increases your production. You write more, and faster. You find what you've written easier. It's only $40, and your writing in it will live on your laptop (you can back up to the cloud, if you […]
Some easy writing advice to follow, offered all the time, is show instead of tell. But it takes careful work to remove showing at the same time you remove barrier words from your writing. Barrier words are ones that make a story less vivid and make the writer more obvious. You don't want the latter to happen. We […]
Creativity requires faith, and sticking to your creative faith is easier with exemplary practices to follow. I’m a Catholic boy if you go back far enough. We learned our faith in part by studying the lives of the disciples. The root of the word disciple means to show a devotion, so these 12 practices are […]
Over at Kristen Lamb's website, a column by Cait Reynolds examines some aspects of distance to be travelled as a control of story pace. She mentions means of transit as well as physical distance. People go places in most stories, and if yours includes a trip longer than a jaunt to the bathroom, there's a time […]
Theme is among the most mysterious and powerful elements of storytelling. In the classic pyramid of writing crafts from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, theme stands at the pinnacle. Theme is represented by symbols in that pyramid, the icons such as candles in a story about being lost. Even though it's at the top of that […]
Malcolm Gladwell writes in What the Dog Saw, "Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on its ability to engage you, to think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head." This is true whether you write non-fiction, novels, or the blend […]
Voice is an important part of growing as a writer, because it's a gateway to writing more effortlessly. Creating anything will always require effort. But struggling in a first draft can be a sign of over-thinking your writing. Ron Shelton, the screenwriter of Bull Durham and White Men Can't Jump, says he's got a sign […]