From Rick: Here’s the problem: Advice on writing is easy to come by, but who should you listen to for the most reliable advice? What do you do when the advice is contradictory? —Should you listen to the bestselling authors
Read moreFrom Rick: I recently watched a short video from Reedsy.com on common new writer mistakes. It’s a short video (13 minutes) and worth watching. However, I’m going to summarize them below, add a few comments, and add some other tips
Read moreFrom Rick: I’ve previously talked about the evils of “as” clauses, and I lumped the overuse of present participles (“-ing” words) in with those. In my 3/22/2021 post I briefly touched on present participles as well and some issues with
Read moreFrom Rick: In my 3/8/2021 post I talked about overusing “said” in dialogue tags, and in the second sentence of that post I said, “I want to make it clear that I AM NOT ADVOCATING REPLACING “SAID” WITH OTHER WORDS
Read moreFrom Rick: (1) Consider the following passage, which is an excerpt from a novel I read. I changed the characters’ names and replaced one term with “mutants”: ===== As soon as Tom put away the radio, something immense and heavy
Read moreFrom Rick: Before any of you stomp on me for the title of this post, I want to make it clear that I AM NOT ADVOCATING REPLACING “SAID” WITH OTHER WORDS as a matter of course. The purpose of this
Read moreFrom Rick: This time I’m going to wrap up my advice on analyzing your story. I certainly haven’t covered everything, but I have tried to cover most of the essentials for ensuring your story has the right impact on your
Read moreFrom Rick: So far in this series, I’ve dealt with three aspects: (1) your story’s purpose in terms of what you want to convey to your reader (2) keeping the reader with you in terms of understanding the characters’ motives
Read moreFrom Rick: Story logic comes from two sources: external and internal. Both are equally important. Let’s first define what I mean by each. External logic deals with how pieces of information, such as historical and scientific facts that relate to
Read moreFrom Rick: This week I’m going to divert from my “Analyzing your story” series to give you s short list of some excellent writing tips I recently got from my local writer’s group. Before I get to that, I want
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