show don’t tell

Bad writing habitsBasics of writing

A balancing act: keeping the reader informed and interested-Part 2

From Rick: I’m going to do something a little different this time to demonstrate how one balances two important aspects of a story: informing the reader and maintaining reader interest. I did a previous post on this, but here I’m

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Basics of writing

Perspectives on creative writing and storytelling

From Rick: What is creative writing? According to one Wikipedia article: “Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character

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Bad writing habitsEditing

Rules, rules, rules–I’m so sick of rules!

From Rick: On blog after blog about writing, writers are inundated with rules. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much the so-called rules of good writing really matter. Thinking about that triggered another random thought. In the Broadway show, and

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DialogueEditing

Writing great dialog–Part 3: tags & attributes

From Rick: In Part 2 of this series I said I was going to cover slang and dialect this time. Well, I decided to move that to a later post, primarily because I want to do more research on that.

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Basics of writingDialogue

Writing great dialog–Part 2

From Rick: In this part, I’m going discuss defining character with dialog. Many new authors don’t grasp this starting out, and they end up having all their characters talk alike. We’ve all read novels where it was difficult to keep

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Basics of writingDialogueNovel writing

Writing great dialog–Part 1

From Rick: As I mentioned in last week’s brief post, Scott and I lately have been quite busy. So, for a while, we’re going to reduce the length of our blog posts, dividing them into multiple posts when necessary, to

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