Getting Situated: Creating Your Ideal Work Pattern
Hemingway made sure he wrote no less than 500 words a day, every day. Faulkner always drank whiskey when he wrote, while Balzac is known to have sometimes consumed more than ten cups of espresso per day while he was working. Thomas Wolfe allegedly preferred to write while standing up. Getting sloshed while working will not make you the next Faulkner....
March 30, 2008 READ MORE
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