Tag: writing tips
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Writing Devices
Introducing a new series of entertaining and educational videos, each focused on a different rhetorical device that you can employ to make your writing pop. These videos are brought to you by Firefly Shadow Theater. Watch them all and share them with writers, students, and teachers. We’ll be posting more videos as we create them. Stay…
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Revision can be fun!
Check out this video made by a school after one of my interactive presentations about revision. After creating a rough draft, I asked students to revise for word choice, dialogue, details, plot, character development, setting, etc. The improvisation was so funny and full of great examples of living writing.
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Judith Viorst on Writing
Read Jessica Goldstein’s engaging interview with Judith Viorst in the Sept 1 issue of The Washington Post. Here are my favorite excerpts: “‘I am obnoxiously disciplined,’ said Viorst… Viorst gives herself quotas. She polishes the pages. She tells the children whose classrooms she visits that ‘I’m not a writer. I’m a rewriter. I go over…
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Exformation
“…great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication theorists sometimes call exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.” –David Foster Wallace…
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Slicing a Yam
Yes, I collect beautiful sentences. Here are two from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. One character describing the way another character speaks: “It reminded him of slicing a yam with a newly sharpened knife, the easy perfection in every slice.” Describing how a boy from a rural village describes his first sight of the larger, affluent town:…
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What Should I Write?
Writers who want to cross that threshold from amateur to professional often ask whether they should focus their attention on a project that seems marketable or write whatever they want to write. Look at it this way…whatever you write might not get published, even if you believe it is a marketable idea; so why not…
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How to write when your character is a little crazy
I am hard at work on the next novel, and I’m using a different process. Usually I find the voice of the novel first (Is it the voice of the main character? Is it the voice of a narrator?) and then I write my rough draft in the voice. So, I started this project by…
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Bannockburn Elementary School Mystery Writers
Thanks to master teacher Liza Levenson, I was invited back to teach a 2-part workshop on Mystery Writing to the fabulous fourth graders at Bannockburn Elementary School! I loved working with the two classes on brainstorming, crafting, and writing the mysteries. Teacher Monica Obstgarten created this visual for the outline we came up with for…
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If you’re stumped, just hold on…
From Jonah Lehrer’s book, Imagine: How Creativity Works “…the act of being stumped is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer–before we probably even know the question–we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach…It’s often only at this point, after we’ve stopped searching…
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Pencil Tips Writing Workshop Blog
I’m delighted to join children’s book writers and illustrators Jacqueline Jules, Alison Hart, Mary Quattlebaum, Laura Krauss Melmed,and Joan Waites as a co-blogger at the Pencil Tips Writing Workshop.My first entry, about the value of sharing mistakes, was just posted. Each blogger takes a turn posting a tip. Please consider subscribing and/or pass along the…