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One Thought Per Sentence 27 Aug 2013 | 09:17 am
One maxim that my students find helpful is: One thought per sentence. Readers only process one thought at a time. So give them time to digest the first set of facts you want them to know. Then give th...
Don’t Be Ashamed to Use the Thesaurus 26 Aug 2013 | 09:20 am
Don’t be ashamed to use the thesaurus. I could spend all day reading Roget’s! There’s nothing better when you’re in a hurry and you need the right word right now. SUSAN ORLEAN
Good Writing is Coco Chanel's Little Black Dress 25 Aug 2013 | 09:23 am
Good writing is Coco Chanel’s little black dress, but –ly adverbs are women who wear too much jewelry and pin flowers in their hair. I like to rip them, tear them, strip them off until there’s nothin...
Avoid Prologues 24 Aug 2013 | 09:04 am
Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, an...
Don't Look Back Until You've Written an Entire Draft 23 Aug 2013 | 09:01 am
Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substanti...
Cut Superfluous Dialogue 22 Aug 2013 | 09:02 am
Dialogue which does not move the story along, or add to the mood of the story, or have an easily definable reason for being there at all (such as to establish important characterization), should be co...
Names Are Terribly Important 21 Aug 2013 | 09:06 am
Names are terribly important. I spend forever coming up with names. Sometimes a character doesn’t work until I change his name. In Bandits, Frank Matusi didn’t work. I changed him to Jack Delaney and ...
Avoid Good Writing While Composing 20 Aug 2013 | 09:03 am
It’s too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you’re in the middle of putting your work together. It’s very much like taking your car apart and having all the pieces on the floor when so...
Memoirists Must Show and Tell 19 Aug 2013 | 09:04 am
Memoir is the intersection of narration and reflection, of storytelling and essay writing. It can present its story and consider the meaning of the story. The first commandment of fiction—Show, Don’t ...
Your Protagonist Cannot Be Perfect 18 Aug 2013 | 09:02 am
The protagonist of a play cannot be a perfect person. If he were, he could not improve, and he must come out at the end of the play a more admirable human being than he went in. MAXWELL ANDERSON
