Writing advice: Who should you listen to?

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

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Story flaws: Finding and fixing them—PART 2

From Rick: In PART-1, I talked about three major flaws a story can have: (1) The story fails to engage the reader (2) The characters fail to engage the reader (3) The story takes too long to become interesting (or

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Overwritten manuscripts: how to fix—PART 3

From Rick: In Part 2, I talked about two ways in which writers may overwrite: —unnecessary use of characters’ names —repeated words and phrases In this last part I’ll finish up this series by talking about three other ways writers

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Overwritten manuscripts: how to fix—PART 2

From Rick: Last time, I pointed out several ways in which writers overwrite their stories and novels: —unnecessary dialogue tags —wordiness in general —unnecessary repetition of information To that list I want to add: —unnecessary use of characters’ names —repeated

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Overwritten: a surfeit of words—PART 1

From Rick: Mark Twain’s essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” is famous both for its typical Twain humor and for Twain’s rules for good writing. I’ve mentioned this essay before. You can do a Google search for it, or you can

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