Category: Writer’s Blog
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Letting go to let voice flow
Speech is not robotic and grammatically perfect; it’s sometimes rushed, sometimes painful, often quirky or unconventional.
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The essential wiring
You want all the wires to be connected in such a way as to enable the climax to work. You don’t want any broken circuits.
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Maintain a flexible imagination
You have to allow yourself to consider all the options that you never allowed yourself to consider.
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What rhymes with pomegranate?
Beginning students mistakenly assume that using a writer’s tool, such as a dictionary, is cheating; but relying only on the rhymes that are in the alphabet of your own brain doesn’t prove anything.
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Writing through the wrong
My first thought: what a waste of effort, time, and keystrokes! My second (and wiser) thought: what necessary writing!
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Gift-wrapped surprises
Are you revealing everything in your story up front or are you concealing some surprises for the reader?
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Writing for children, according to L’Engle
This great quote came to my attention from Melissa Henderson, Head of Children’s Services, The Glencoe Public Library, Glencoe, Illinois.
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Entrances and exits
Think of your book as a stage. Is each entrance and exit perfectly crafted to suit the character and the story?
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Listen to fifth graders
Is your character passive or active? What does the main character actually do in the story?
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Offering a critique
A playwright and dramaturg for Charter Theatre, Richard Washer emphasizes that instead of telling a writer how to fix a manuscript, it’s more useful to simply tell the writer how you experienced the story (or play, or poem). What did you picture in your mind as you read/heard the story? Were any parts unclear? What…