Show, Don’t Tell: Avoiding the ‘Information Dump’ in Fiction
The key to good fiction is giving your readers a reason to keep going — little mysteries and mini-conflicts that add suspense and create tension. After all, if you feel like you know everything about a character in the first few pages, is there any real reason to waste time finding out what will happen to him? Here’s what I mean: Pete works at a pharmacy. He’s in h...
March 28, 2008 READ MORE
Three Writing Prompts to Get Your Fingers Flying
Even the world’s greatest musicians practice daily and spend time warming up before performances. As a writer, you, too, need to work your creative muscles with some exercises designed to challenge your creativity, stretch your limits, and rev your writing engine. Spend no more than ten minutes on each of these prompts. Set an alarm to snap you out of your wr...
March 28, 2008 READ MORE
Prevent Procrastination: How to get the job done without waiting until the last minute
Writers are known procrastinators. Whether we're afraid our ideas won't be good enough, or we're waiting for inspiration to strike, we tend to set ourselves up for stress by waiting until the last-possible minute to begin serious work on our projects. But it is possible to break away from this pattern. Whether you have an internal email to write, a blog, or a white paper...
March 27, 2008 READ MORE
There is a lot to be said of brevity. Shakespeare wrote somewhat ironically through the mouthpiece of the long-winded Polonius in Hamlet that “brevity is the soul of wit.” And William Strunk reminds us in Elements of Style that “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unn...
March 27, 2008 READ MORE
One of the most difficult parts of writing – even if you write all day, every day – is learning to ignore your internal editor when you’re working on a first draft. Even now, as I start writing, I can hear the nagging voice of doubt that makes it difficult to put words on paper. My particular voice of doubt looks a bit like my ninth-grade English teacher: She’s go...
March 26, 2008 READ MORE
When you work with words every day, it’s not always easy to keep your vocabulary fresh. I’m a word junkie. I’d like to think that I’m a formidable Scrabble opponent. I even have one of those dorky word-a-day calendars on my desk. But, like any other writer, I occasionally slip into a word choice wasteland where mediocrity rules and the most compelling adjectives I ...
March 25, 2008 READ MORE
Sometimes when trying to achieve a fun, casual tone in writing, especially important in many marketing and sales projects, it’s usually best to write the same way we talk, right? Wrong. Our speech is riddled with poor grammar and misused words because we don’t have the advantage of editing our words as we speak (but wouldn’t that make the world a much better place?)...
March 24, 2008 READ MORE
After completing my first feature-length article, I received a mini-lesson on the art of asking questions in your writing to keep the reader’s interest. In order to be effective and engaging, each paragraph should begin and end with a question – not literally, of course – a sort of literary catapult that moves the reader, and the writing, forward. For example, take ...
March 19, 2008 READ MORE
In the world of writing, writer’s block is an inevitable beast even the most valiant of writers must take on. After all, writing full time is not for the faint of heart. Luckily, there are a few tricks of the trade to keep the brain functioning and the creativity flowing even when the ugly beast is breathing fire in your face. 1. Turn the computer screen off. Sometimes,...
March 19, 2008 READ MORE
Any good writer will tell you to build your sentences on verbs. It's not nouns or adverbs or adjectives that make your prose shine. When it comes to great writing, the verb is the powerhouse. OK, so write with verbs. That sounds easy enough. But as with all things writing, wrapping your sentences around verbs can be more difficult than you think. To make it even more diff...
November 29, 2007 READ MORE
