From Rick: What’s the best way to promote your writing? As far as I know, it’s still word of mouth. In fact, that pretty much applies to promoting and marketing anything. Beyond that, I don’t pretend to have any answers
Read moreFirst person or third person: which is better? From Rick: A few years back, I did a post on the differences between a story, an anecdote, and an essay and how to tell which you’ve written. Classifying your piece properly
Read moreFrom Rick: Why is dialog important? In the past I’ve done several posts on dialogue, and you can find them under DIALOGUE in the categories list. There are five narrative modes in fiction (Description, Exposition, Dialogue, Thoughts, Action), and of
Read moreFrom Rick: You’ll find many articles on the internet and whole books devoted to advice on how to write a scene. I’m not going to pretend to know everything nor claim that I know better. What I want to do
Read moreFrom Rick: In my June 1, 2020 post I talked about how to deal with character thoughts, specifically inner (direct) thoughts. I also talked about indirect thoughts. In a novel I’m currently editing, I noticed some places where the author
Read moreFrom Rick: I had a different post planned for this week, but in the middle of the week, Kris Rusch grabbed me with an excellent her post on her blog. I know I mention her a lot on this blog,
Read moreFrom Rick: Before I begin this post, I want to say that I have significantly added to and updated the “Common Compound Words” file I mentioned in my 5/11/2020 post. If you already downloaded it, you’ll want to do so
Read moreFrom Rick: What do I mean by “Keep your writing real”? Before I answer that question, I want to point out that the question mark in that sentence above is correctly placed. Why? Because the question mark applies to the
Read moreFrom Rick: I don’t know about you, but as a writer and an editor, I’m constantly beset with problems when dealing with compound words: should it be one word, two words, or a hyphenated word? We all know that “bedroom”
Read moreFrom Rick: Continuing the grammar lessons that I started in late March, I want to talk about the words “there” and “more.” We rarely pay much attention to their role because they’re so common. The part of speech of “there”
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