Imagine a flavorful stew. Bobbing around in a spicy broth might be chunks of meat, carrots, potatoes (not too soft), celery, onion. Perhaps, once-frozen peas or kernels of corn. Turnips (if you like them) and a few cloves of garlic.
Occasionally, as a writer you might want to yell about how sick you are of words, especially if you must find the right word “all day through” just to inch your manuscript into the next sentence or paragraph. Eliza Doolittle
Most writers dislike revising and editing. If you haven’t reached this stage in the writing process, you may be dreading it. If you have, you may dislike it as much as most writers. Or you may be like me. I
The song “Stuck in the Middle with You” by Stealers Wheel is stuck in my mind, an agreeable kind of earworm. The part that crawls around in my head is the refrain: Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the
Blog 12 “Courting Characters” and Blog 13 “Creating Characters” were all about characterization. Well, not quite all. Although they dwelt on determining which characters you wanted to populate your fiction and how to reveal them, they didn’t go far enough.
Now that you have courted characters (Blog #12) for your story, novel, screenplay, or other fiction and can identify a possible protagonist, an antagonist, a co-protagonist or – antagonist, a love interest, a foil, or even some tertiary characters, you’re
At the end of the last blog (#11 Giving Chase to Plot), I invited you to “Choose one [word] from Column A and one from Column B [and] imagine a plot based on the two words. Imagine a few episodes
What does giving chase have to do with writing? In this and the next three blogs, I explore how writing is an ongoing process of chasing what works in fiction and non-fiction. It’s not prolonged and unrelenting, just steady. We
How fast would you eat raw rhubarb? Ice cream? Saltwater taffy? These and other questions invite you to think about pace. The key is to move along as fast as the mind of the reader. . .but how do you
So, where do you start?
The answer is simple. You write what you need to write. Then you have permission to begin your piece there or search for it somewhere else – a few pages beyond the first page, in
You may not think you’re ready for AP writing. I know this is only the eighth blog you’ve read, but you’re ready to think seriously about AUDIENCE and PURPOSE (and I’m going to throw in another “A”.
The title of this blog sounds a bit like a warning. Beware: Your first word is your last. It’s not, however. It’s just a crisp way of saying that you won’t get to the last word of your writing if
You’ll recognize this list of conditions for successful writing espoused by one or more authors. and the chart for ranking the conditions yourselves, especially those that are not Absolute.
As you consider the label – Absolute – in terms of the first three conditions in the previous blog and the three in this blog, please remember that you are in charge.
Jerry Lee Lewis was the first to record “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In)” in 1967, backed by the Memphis Boys, but the song is probably better known as the 1968 hit recorded by The
Ready: You may be wondering if you’re ready to write. What – exactly – signals readiness? Set: Or you may be wondering what must be set up and how. There’s no dearth of recommendations. Having found what they need to
Willie, Elvis, the Pet Shop Boys, Brenda Lee, and others popularized the song “Always on My Mind.” At first, this gentle, rueful song made me feel sad. Then I listened closely to the lyrics and got mad. The song was
One of the many nicknames I earned as a child was accurate: “Swivel head.” It wasn’t because I resembled the girl in The Exorcist, with my head going around. In fact, it never did go completely around, just left-right, right-left,