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Stephen King's Top 20 Rules for Writers. Image by the USO, via Flickr Commons.
How to Weave Backstory Seamlessly Into Your Novel. My first science thriller, Freezing Point, opens with the crew of a fishing trawler braving rough seas off the coast of St.
John’s, Newfoundland: The wind howled around the solitary trawler like an angry god. Inside the wheelhouse, Ben Maki braced himself as an errant wave hit broadside and the trawler listed heavily to starboard. Sleet spattered the windows on the port side. White patches of sea ice told him they were close.
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5 Ways to Get Rid of Your Damn Empty Modifiers. I discussed the need to get rid of empty emphatics when I gave you 8 words to seek and destroy in your writing, but just saying that you should get rid of a thing doesn't say much about the right way to do so.
Today I'm going to show you a few of my favorite ways to get rid of your empty modifiers. What exactly is an empty modifier?
Make the Difference. Plots. Disciplines > Storytelling > Plots Different plots | The story structure | See also Stories have plots or storylines, by which the stories are told.
Writing. Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling. These rules were originally tweeted by Emma Coats, Pixar’s Story Artist.
Number 9 on the list – When you’re stuck, make a list of what wouldn’t happen next – is a great one and can apply to writers in all genres.
The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations. The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations is a descriptive list which was created by Georges Polti to categorize every dramatic situation that might occur in a story or performance.
To do this Polti analyzed classical Greek texts, plus classical and contemporaneous French works. He also analyzed a handful of non-French authors.
How to Become a Writer — The Harsh Reality. 4inShareinShare Since starting this blog last year, I have regularly been asked about how to become a professional writer.
Mary, one of my keener subscribers (see – I didn’t forget you), recently raised the topic again and prompted me to think some more on it.
25 Ways To Fight Your Story’s Mushy Middle. For me, the middle is the hardest part of writing.
It’s easy to get the stallions moving in the beginning — a stun gun up their asses gets them stampeding right quick. I don’t have much of a problem with endings, either; you get to a certain point and the horses are worked up into a mighty lather and run wildly and ineluctably toward the cliff’s edge. But the middle, man, the motherfucking middle.
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Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules For Writing Fiction. LyX – The Document Processor. PageFour - Novel Writing Software - Software for Creative Writers - includes a tabbed word processor and easy navigation area.
Ideas
Ideas. Neither the Billionaire nor the Tramp: Economics in Speculative Fiction by Jeremy L. C. Jones. I sat at a table full of professors and tried to explain the idea of world-building.
This was five years ago. Jeff VanderMeer and I (along with about a dozen others) were scrambling to put the final touches on Shared Worlds, a writing and world-building camp for teenagers at South Carolina's Wofford College.
Exercises for Fiction Writers - Page 2. Plot Scenario Generator.
The most annoying sound in the world. 5-Step Secret To Great Fiction. By Suzanne Harrison Stephen King says he starts his novels with a "What if?
" question.
100 Exquisite Adjectives. By Mark Nichol Adjectives — descriptive words that modify nouns — often come under fire for their cluttering quality, but often it’s quality, not quantity, that is the issue. Plenty of tired adjectives are available to spoil a good sentence, but when you find just the right word for the job, enrichment ensues.
Practice precision when you select words. Here’s a list of adjectives: Subscribe to Receive our Articles and Exercises via Email You will improve your English in only 5 minutes per day, guaranteed!
25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing. I read this cool article last week — “30 Things To Stop Doing To Yourself” — and I thought, hey, heeeey, that’s interesting.
Writers might could use their own version of that. So, I started to cobble one together. And, of course, as most of these writing-related posts become, it ended up that for the most part I’m sitting here in the blog yelling at myself first and foremost. That is, then, how you should read this: me, yelling at me. If you take away something from it, though? Then go forth and kick your writing year in the teeth.
36 Writing Essays by Chuck Palahniuk. 1: Establishing Your Authority Chuck teaches two principal methods for building a narrative voice your readers will believe in.
Discover the Heart Method and the Head Method and how to employ each to greatest effect. 2: Developing a Theme At the core of Minimalism is focusing any piece of writing to support one or two major themes. Learn harvesting, listing, and other methods, after a fun excursion into the spooky side of Chuck's childhood.