On another site, on which I’d written a long comment about the statement “ignorance is bliss” someone complimented my writing (always pleasant to hear) and thought my “story-writing brain” was completely back in service. Which–though much improved–it’s not. That’s not a venue in which to explain how many different components and levels a fiction writing Read More…
Tag: tools for writing
Fast Tips for Tightening Your Writing
Whether it’s a letter, essay, short story, or longer pieces, here are some easy ways to make it tighter, snappier, and (if you’re up against a word limit) shorter. Go active: change passive voice (“He was hit by a truck”) to active voice (“A truck hit him.”) Watch for sneaky forms of passive by scanning Read More…
Revision: Firing Up the Chainsaw
Like everything else in writing, there are many ways to approach revision, and I’ve written quite a bit about the process elsewhere. But every writer and every project has unique challenges. For NewBook, I’m choosing a slower (since I have no deadline) but thorough and reliable method to cope with its nature and history. I Read More…
What Writers Argue About
Writers argue about everything. We hold different views on what other writers *should* write about, what topics are too something (ordinary, fantastic, political, politically naive, mundane, exotic, narrow, broad…) or not enough something (same list), how writers should handle certain topics, if writers should use some hot-button term, whether a phrase in common use 150 Read More…
And then what?
The most important question for a storyteller is the one asked by anxious readers who are glued to the story…”And then what happened?” In any of its variant forms, this question means that so far the story is functioning as it should. The glue itself varies with the reader…I remember books praised by other kids, Read More…
NewBook Wakes Up
NewBook has acquired impulsion (in horses, the compressed desire to go forward…the horse is “between legs and hand” or “on the bit”.) It’s pushing me now to write more , a very good sign, even if, in the end, it means dumping a lot already written. Sunday the 29th, it was at 52,500+ a bit Read More…
Vocabulary: Staff, Team, Crew, and Gender
A couple of months ago (or longer…I didn’t write down the date) I saw a discussion on Twitter of the need for gender-free terms to use in space-related activities. Most of us (and certainly at least half of us) are aware that the old agreement that “man” and “men” included “woman” and “women” was, basically Read More…
Why Does It Slow Down? (Tech Post)
One reason many people who start out wanting to write don’t go on with it is that they have lots of ideas, start writing and then…the story slows down. Or actually stops. They don’t know why. They don’t know that this is normal for many writers. They sure don’t know what to do about it. Read More…
The Naming of People, Places, Things
Without looking up the source (bad scholar, but it’s that kind of day) I think it was Owen Barfield in an essay about language, corporations, and legal fictions who suggested that language itself is rooted in the ability to abstract and name a concept, and that is itself a form of fiction (or lie, if Read More…
Culture-building: Virtues & Vices
See, there’s a bonus to the previous post–today you get two new posts. Today’s topic is culture-building–some thoughts on creating cultures-not-like-ours-exactly (or at all) and specifically some thoughts on how cultures differentiate along the fault lines of, well, faults. What’s right. What’s wrong. What the people in that culture think about the “why” behind what’s Read More…