Category: The Process of Writing
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Nitpicking Narrators – Part I: My name is Jake
While I’m busy with grad school, I’ll be replaying some of the most-read posts from my old blog. Some people instantly gravitate to one particular narrative style. The story they’re writing just naturally lends itself to one Point of View (POV) in particular. After all, who would want to read…
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Nitpicking Narrators – Part III: You are walking down a dark alley
While I’m busy with grad school, I’ll be replaying some of the most-read posts from my old blog. Some people instantly gravitate to one particular narrative style. The story they’re writing just naturally lends itself to one Point of View (POV) in particular. After all, who would want to read…
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Writing Exercise: If I’d known then…
For the December section of his “A Calendar of Tales” project, Neil Gaiman wrote a short story in which a runaway briefly meets her future self. (The collection of short stories is posted publicly, so you don’t have to feel guilty about reading them. Seriously, I’m in love with this…
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DIY Editing: Seems? I know not ‘seems’!
I’ve got a weird favorite Shakespeare quote. While other people are off getting lovey dovey with Romeo and Juliet, or sniggering along with Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I’ve got a thing for Act 1, Scene 2 of Hamlet: Shortly after the death of his father, Hamlet’s mother remarks that…
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Writing Exercise: If things had been different…
You already know I’m into Bioshock Infinite, as well as Fringe and the Star Trek reboot. Apart from all being some pretty fun Sci-Fi, all three deal with different timelines and realities. (You’ll also find Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, and Terry Pratchett’s…
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Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy…
People talk about character motivation all the time– what’s the character’s inner yearning, the secret desire of their heart, the thing that makes them get out of bed in the morning? I’m not here to talk about that. Instead I want to talk about something much more basic– which means…
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Borrowed inspiration
The weirdest thing happened this week. I was reading a blog post, when this person named SugarOpal invited me to give the subject of the post a shot. In case you haven’t decided to follow the delectable links, it goes like this: An older– now mostly defunct– therapy technique involved…
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DIY Editing: A comma conundrum
Behold the comma: it’s the most dreaded of punctuation marks, and one of the most misused and abused. And for good reason. In the English language, most punctuation marks have no more than two or three uses. A period will always either end a sentence or abbreviate a word. An…
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Adventures with Scrivener
Until now, I’ve only really used a few features of Scrivener: the goal and wordcount feature, the folders, the ‘split at section’ command, and occasionally the research file. This time I’m trying something different. I wrote the whole of this draft in Microsoft Word. Because I wasn’t using any features aside from…
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DIY Editing: Whose line is it, anyway?
If you want the basics of punctuation, check out these guys here: Mr. Clements.com Bubblecow.net Fanfic.TheForce.net A step past the basics 1) Avoid using synonyms for said/asked, unless that synonym dramatically changes the meaning of the sentence. 2) British English uses single quotes (‘You’re a wizard, Harry!’) while American English…
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