If you know WYSIWYG, an abbreviation for What You See Is What You Get, you’ll remember that it promised to put the same thing on paper that you saw on the screen. That is, whatever your text looked like on … Continue reading
Category Archives: Writing
Tension and Growth
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Somebody, somewhere must’ve said, “Life is Growth.” While we’re alive, we experience change and we learn from it. In the beginning, we start small and grow bigger, learn how to walk, say “Mama,” and run without hitting walls. Why? Because … Continue reading
Fifth Estate User’s Manual
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The Fifth Estate includes social media, blogs, the internet in general, and all of us. Estates One, Two, and Three The first “three estates” describe the social hierarchy in medieval times. It consisted of the clergy, nobility, and commoners. But … Continue reading
Central Phoenix Writers Workshop
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Four nights a week, the Central Phoenix Writers Workshop meets to critique and commiserate. A recent Wednesday evening session is pictured above a half hour before the meeting begins. It draws twenty or so writers most of the year, with … Continue reading
Rules o’ Ritin’
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There’s lots of them, of course: punctuation, word choice, active versus passive voice and all that. Here’s one I just figured out: When you’re writing the draft, write the draft. The key point? DON’T EDIT! Just write. Don’t look at … Continue reading
NaNoWriMo Approacheth
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National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is almost here. [Sounds of gnashing teeth, scribbling pencils, fingernails on mouse pads and, most importantly, the repeated sharp “crack” as the slave driver limbers up his whip.] Since 1999, this annual event has helped … Continue reading
Adverb’s Disease
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Beware! My writing is afflicted with a horrible disease. Adverb’s Disease shows as weak little words attached to verbs. They add nothing to the story and just take up space and time. A pure waste of ink! Diagnosed by one of the … Continue reading
The A, B, C, D and F of Editing Fiction
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Here’s the process I’ll be trying out as I edit the nearly 500 pages of double-spaced text in my first draft. First, some definitions using the grading system we all learned in school. Fiction is built with several parts: Action … Continue reading
Whose Head Is It Anyway?
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In fiction, viewpoint lets the reader know who is telling the story. And it also limits what they can tell the reader. A lot of books are told, not from the main character’s view, but rather from a narrator’s viewpoint. Bob, a … Continue reading
Advice for Writers
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When I started Serpent’s Smile with the “one chapter per week” goal, my writing process included a rewrite and an edit before each post. That was how I blogged – or at least how I tried to blog. For the … Continue reading