We welcome all writing.
Everyone is always telling you that you need good mechanics, so why am I wasting your time talking about it too? Well, if you already study regularly and frequently in your never-ending and joyful quest to master grammar, punctuation, and word usage, then please skip this article. But if your motivation or practice falls below …
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Syntax gives us the power to say things that don’t make sense: Ideas can’t have color (or crash a car), and something colorless can’t also be green, but I can say “colorless green ideas crashed my car,” and you can understand me, even if you’re quite not sure what I mean. The structure of a …
What do you do with the pieces you don’t yet have the skill to finish? I used to leave them around in notebooks and never finish them. Half-abandoned, half-forgotten, they were a source of nebulous anxiety, though I vaguely planned to get back to them someday. Sometimes I’d remember one and think, “Hey, I know what …
When I write a first draft, I grab character names off the nearest shelf in my brain. I’ll bet at least 50% of my characters started off named “Carla” or “Carlos.” I try to find a more fitting name in the second or third draft, but usually I don’t get much more adventurous than “Edna” …
When I studied Spanish in high school, we had an assignment to write a recipe and present it in class. One of the recipes was for Homemade Ranch Salad Bandage – you know, that white stuff you put on a salad when it skins its knee. Yes, they actually meant salad dressing. But guess what. The …
Will you try an experiment with me? Read this excerpt from a short story I’m working on: “A pleasure,” I said, and he must have heard me, for he bowed his head. Then he turned and walked down the stairs. Now compare: “A pleasure,” I said, and he must have heard me, for he bowed …
When somebody tells you to take something out, sometimes the solution is to do it more. This often works in visual art: That area of purple in the upper right corner of your painting, the one that’s “ruining” the composition? Instead of removing it, put more purple in other parts of the painting. Suddenly it all comes together. I …
What Makes for an “AWESOME” Description? As a second-grader, I was told: Dress up your writing. In other words, I should be more descriptive. My teachers equated “descriptive” with adjectives and adverbs. They told me not to merely write, “Once upon a time, there was a princess who lived in a castle.” They advised me to embellish my …
Often new members come to our writing group and ask for feedback on their as-yet-uncompleted novel. Or someone who’s been with us a while will get an idea for a story while at the group, write a few scenes of it during the writing sessions, and then ask everybody what we think. This seems perfectly …
In this post, I’m passing along some thoughts about tools that work for me and might help some of you too—creating your own style guide and editing list. Style Guide One of the most well-known style guides is the Chicago Manual of Style. You can use the book or the online version to look up …
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