Category: On Writing
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Talking Down to Readers
That Pedantic Tone of Writing You know the style of writing – “Now let me tell you a story…” or “As you shall see in the end…” The style of writing where a strong narrator’s voice almost intrudes into the story, reminding the reader that it is a story. Often this is thought of as…
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Why Blog?
Advice for New/Old Bloggers Apparently the number of blogs on the net is approaching infinity – if you count everyone’s Myspace and Facebook notes and so on. Still, if that is true, why on earth am I writing another one? Or if it was your New Year’s Resolution to start one yourself, why should you…
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Breaking the 10 Simple Rules for Writing a Novel
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. — W. Somerset Maugham Well, while surfing the net I stumbled across a lovely article advising people on how to write a novel in 2012 – you know, if that’s your New Year’s Resolution or something. And some of the…
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Happy Endings vs. Sad Endings
And Everything In Between Endings are one of the hardest things for me to write. Obviously, I feel the weight of the readers’ expectations—hey, if anyone is reading this, they’re trusting me to end this satisfactorily! And I’ve read so many books where a so-so ending kept the book from becoming great. But both happy…
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The E-Publishing Experiment
So I decided to take a shot at e-publishing. If you listen to the hype, the world of e-publishing has exploded in the last couple years—it is the way of the future, it will revolutionize the industry, and so on and so forth. I’m not sure if all the evidence supporting that is in yet,…
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Why It’s Harder to Write a Term Paper Than a Blog
Some people might think blogging is pretty scary – putting up stuff for all the world to criticize, and maybe to use to your disadvantage when you run for President someday (fortunately, there’s no chance of me doing that). However, I realized these past two weeks that writing academic papers scares me more. Then I…
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A Thought From Diana Wynne Jones – To Plan Or Not To Plan (Your Novel)
“Another common question which naturally follows on from here is Do you plan your book out before you start it? and my answer is always unequivocally, No that kills it dead. This always shocks teachers, who are accustomed to have told their pupils that you can’t write that way. But I am afraid I do,…
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Do You Need to be Younger than 40 to Write Great Novels?
The other day, Little Brown Mushroom Blog linked to an article in the New York Times – an article which claims that most great novels are written by authors under the age of forty. The Little Brown Mushroom Blog was interested in this because they wanted to know if the same was true for photographers.…
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Healthy Romance Makes Bad Novels
What’s a Novelist to Do? I come up against this problem all the time when I try to write a romance about two healthy, well-adjusted people – what on earth should come between them and prevent happily ever after? This is related to ‘The Trouble with Modern Romance.’ In the good old days, the couple…
Hmm... 