From 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 moreIn PART-1 I looked at your story’s purpose, focusing on what you, the writer, want to convey to your reader and what you want your reader to think about. I maintain that every good story does this. Perhaps the most
Read moreIn the online writing group I’m involved in, one of the members is very good at pointing out story flaws from a reader’s perspective. Over the next few posts, I’m going to delve into these issues with the goal of
Read moreFrom Rick: As readers of this blog know, periodically I like to step up on my soapbox. Before I do, I’d like to categorize the manuscripts I am called upon to read in my various capacities. As editors of an
Read moreFrom Rick: Back in May of 2019, I did a post called “Tips from the experts” wherein I pulled out what I considered the best advice and provided a link to the full article I quoted from. Here’s the link
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