Have you ever spent all day writing, only to discover when you lift your fingers from the keyboard that you’ve not written what you planned? Well, it happens to me. A lot. Yep, I just spent all day writing, and not a word of it was written for this post. Oh, I’ve got hundreds of […]
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Writers Battle Diabetes and Win
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m enthusiastic about writers supporting each other. I see more instances of this everywhere I turn. And I’ll mention some of them to you at times. Many of these support efforts come into being because of personal experiences in a writer’s life, or those of friends or family […]
Time to Edit: Oh, the Joy!
My friend Emily Rattray Wenstrom recently wrote about her editing process. She described the first draft as the bones of her story, and later versions as being fleshed out and plumped up. I loved her description of discovering her characters and her setting anew as she began her first edit. That perfectly describes how I […]
Editing: What’s the Magic Number?
You’ve been writing for hours. Is it time to edit? Maybe. It depends on what type of editing you’re thinking of implementing. Do you find it helps you refocus the direction of your story to stop at the end of the day and spend some time doing a light edit of the pages you’ve just […]
The Writer: Last Days of an Icon
One hundred twenty five years dedicated to “inspire, instruct and inform writers at all levels.” That is the mission of The Writer, the magazine flying the tagline “Imagine. Write. Publish.” And the publishers have done all that for over a century. They, and their contributors, inspired writers at all stages of their craft and career through articles […]
Day Eleven – When De-Clutter Gets In The Way of De-Writing
Jeff Goins tells me that my next step on the road to becoming a Master Writer is to declutter. Ouch! I searched for a while, but didn’t find the camera he must have installed in my office. I’m a visual person, with memory problems from a blow to the head. The clutter around me is […]
Keeping the Covenant: It Takes Work
There’s one reality we cannot repudiate. Without a steady diet of well-spun stories, without examples of both fine word craft and cringe-worthy phrases, we can’t understand what makes a story work. Glance over your bookshelves… you do have multiple shelves, don’t you? Which books do you hoard to savor multiple times? I’m betting they’re the […]
Transformed – The Power Of Words
A word is a word is a word – except when it’s not. Don’t you just love words? Big words, little words, sibilant words, harsh words. Each with its own specific meaning, feel and sound. I love that the writer can lay a pile of words on the page, shuffle them to and fro, toss […]