“Let the story tell itself.” – Author Tim O’Brien Want to write a great story? Get out of its way. Your story isn’t about you. Characters might share facets of your personality. Issues you care about might be woven throughout the story. However, the story is about your characters and their conflicts, obstacles, drama, decisions. Give your story center stage. Show, don’t tell: avoid adding comments and clarifications and over-explaining setting and characters’ thoughts and actions. Develop unique metaphors and similes that tie into your story: the setting, characters. Let the story unfold as it needs for the characters present – not how you want it to unfold. Readers don’t want coincidences; they want consequences authentic to the story being told. Focus on the story , and it will be told – not your version of it. ----- Writing in 140 is my attempt to say something somewhat relevant about writing in 140 words or less. Shon Bacon is an author, doctoral candidate, e...

Jodie Renner is our guest today sharing some pointers on description. Fiction writers—one of the fastest ways to bring your story world and characters to life is to portray the setting through the senses, feelings, reactions, and attitude of your protagonist. Enhancing your fiction by filtering the description of the setting through your viewpoint character’s senses is a concept I instinctively embraced when I first started editing fiction about six years ago. I was editing a contemporary middle-school novel, whose two main characters, a boy and a girl, were both eleven years old (details slightly changed). The author had them describing rooms they entered as if they were interior decorators, complete with words like “exquisite,” “stylish,” “coordinated,” “ornate,” and “delightful.” Then, when they were in the park or the woods playing and exploring with friends, each tree, shrub and flower was accurately named and described in details that were way beyond the average preteen’s kn...

Check Your Facts, Ma’am! You’re busy creating your story world with your right brain, rolling along with the great plot and developing your characters while your muse is buzzing. Great! But later, when you’ve got that first draft done, it’s important to switch to your left brain and go back and check for continuity, logic, and accurate information – or get someone else to do it for you. As you’re writing,  you may assume everything makes sense and all your info is correct, but at some point, step back and reread for logistics. While you’re at it, verify your facts, to avoid annoying or even alienating your readers – and eroding your credibility. “But,” you say, “I’m writing fiction, so who cares about facts?” You should, because you want to create a credible world for your readers to be drawn into, and if an erroneous fact jars them out of it, they’re going to be annoyed. Think about watching a movie about Ancient Rome and suddenly you notice a watch on one of the gladiators. ...

Another one of our favorite previously-published posts. *** When you work with the same group of editors for a long time, it becomes a training ground in which you all learn to accommodate each other's styles—especially those of the editor-in-chief. If the big boss hates the word impact (except when talking about car accidents), then everyone learns to edit that word out of their own writing and out of the articles they’re editing. I worked on the same magazine for seven years, and both my bosses were very fond of The Careful Writer by Theodore Bernstein. So I learned not to misuse certain common words, and now I consistently make these edits in the documents of my main corporate client. In turn, the writers at this company are now self-correcting these mistakes. Here are few of the most common word usage errors: Since is a time reference and should not be used to imply cause. Many people had it drilled into their heads that they can’t start a sentence with because, so ...

Honestly, you'd think I'd get over this obsession about adverbs, but I just can't help myself, especially when I keep seeing their misuse over and over in books. Like many beginning writers, I used adverbs liberally when first starting out. I thought they were needed to tell the reader how someone was speaking or how they were acting. Then the light bulb went off. "Geesh, Maryann, it's about showing, not telling." About the same time, I was taking a screenwriting class and learned that it was a huge no-no to use an adverb to indicate how a line was to be spoken. For instance: MIKE (loudly) Get the hell out of my room. My creative writing instructor told the class that it's not the writer's place to tell the actor how to speak - that's the director's job. And we can help the actor and director by writing a line of dialogue that conveys the urgency. The words should indicate how the line should be delivered. Once I got that through my thick skull...

I have multiple personalities: writer and editor. The last few years, I’ve kept my rent paid and my cabinets stocked with corporate editing and writing gigs. It’s my editor self that landed me the first gig and that has kept me employed. Even when I take writing jobs, I bring my red pencil personality with me – it helps me adapt to in-house style guides and turn in squeaky-clean work. But, with so much emphasis on my editing muscles, some days I worry about losing my own unique writing style and voice. When I switch from marketing copy to writing my personal essays, it can take me a while to clear my mind and focus on hearing my voice. Here’s part one of a two-part piece on Discovering & Developing Your Voice. Part 1: Discovering Your Voice Read. Don’t try to write like someone else – unless you’re being paid to temporarily adopt that voice. Figure out what makes the author’s voice unique. Is it the sentence structures? Specific word choice? A certain approach to descriptions? Thin...

Writing can be so much fun. We have the thrill of creating something out of nothing, and when our muse is friendly the words just flow. After that, comes the tedium of editing and line editing. In the first edit, we look for major writing issues: characterization, plot, pacing, and structure. In line editing we focus more on details of the prose. Here are some things to look for: Repetition of words - in a scene with a car, how many times did you use the word car? Circle the word every time you see it, then go back and change some, take others out. Circle the character's name. Can you substitute a pronoun for some of them, a noun for others? Circle the word "said" - can the dialogue stand without it? Can a character action take the place of an attributive? "Sit down," Mary said, motioning to a chair. "Sit down." Mary motioned to a chair. Clauses used in the wrong place – WRONG: He saw a vase of flowers on the counter that was right in the center. RIGHT...

Meet the Editor, Marvin D Wilson Marvin is the author of three books, I Romanced the Stone , Owen Fiddler , and the just-released Between the Storm and the Rainbow . He is a prolific blogger, with an internationally popular and award-winning blog at Free Spirit (http://inspiritandtruths.blogspot.com/) Marvin is a full time writer, is on staff at All Things That Matter Press as an editor, and also does freelance editing. When did you first notice you were hung-up on typos? In college, in an English composition class. My instructor had a hissy fit if we students handed in anything with a typo in it. And back then, they were “type”-ohs – we were still using typewriters, remember those? It was so tempting to leave a “little” mistake in the last paragraph on a page rather than try and go through the pain of fixing it, or even worse re-type the entire doggone page. She would mark us down a whole grade for each and every typo. And nowadays, with the word processor and all the marvelous Word...

There are similarities and differences with respect to writing for a blog tour and writing a book. In this article I will examine four aspects of writing and how they apply similarly or dissimilarly to writing tour posts and books. 1. Planning the Content. Tour stops are like chapters in a book. A book with chapter after chapter of the same content would be pretty boring, would it not? After two or three chapters, you would put the book down and figure the author was going nowhere with this story. Same with a virtual tour. Each chapter should have its own story within the larger story. At the same time the whole story and all its chapters should be cohesive. One stop should lead you with interest to the next. Nothing is worse than a month-long dirge of same old same old “Interview with the Author,” or “Meet the Author” posts. I’m sorry, but I don’t need to read for the umpteenth time what your favorite color is or what your five pets’ names are. Maybe give me that information in ONE of...

Most of these are actually old rules, but these offenses have popped up repeatedly in documents I’ve edited, so they’re worth dusting off and revisiting. Avoid using buzzwords, especially in a way in which they were not originally intended. Examples include: impact, utilize, incentivise . Impact used to be a noun that referred to the effect of a collision; utilize means “to find a profitable or practical use for,” and incentivise just makes me shudder. Affect, use, and motivate are more reader friendly and easier to spell. Do not fill your novel (or report) with clichés. Hanging by a thread, cold as ice, dead as a doornail (whatever the hell that means) are old hat and old school. You can be more creative. Why use ing verbs when present tense verbs work harder? Sloggy: She was jogging down the sidewalk when a car suddenly started veering off the road… Crisp: She jogged down the sidewalk. Suddenly, a car veered off the road Keep verbs phases together whenever possible. Acceptable: S...