From Rick: I’ve been incredibly remiss lately in posting to the blog. It’s been five weeks since the last post. I’ve been focusing on what a writer should focus on: his own writing, and I have several projects ongoing. It’s
Read moreFrom Rick: One of the challenges writers face can be making up fictional identifiers. We rarely have problems with inventing character names. For place names, we have to exercise some caution to avoid potentially disparaging references. If a character stops
Read moreFrom 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: There is no such thing as the perfect editor or the perfect way to edit your work. I freely admit that I do slip up despite my best efforts and intentions. Even good editors can slip up. This
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
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