If brevity is the soul of wit, then economy is the energy of prose. Let’s hear it for skinny sentences! Don’t get me wrong: I love complex, twisty, beautiful sentences. As Aleksandar Hemon pointed out in an interview with The Writer magazine: I like to push language toward poetry, to activate the dormant possibilities inherent in it. […]
March 24, 2010 by 69 Comments Narrative2 Must-Know Rules for Using Italics and Exclamation Points for Emphasis
Excitement is certainly something you want to infuse your stories with. Passion and power, danger and delight—they all require exclamatory writing. But something writers often forget is that emphasis (whether it’s in the form of italics or punctuation) should be treated like salt: A little goes a long way. How Not to Use Italics One of my […]
July 12, 2009 by 43 Comments Narrative5 Ways to Use Pacing to Write a Powerful Story
Pacing is like a dam. It allows the writer to control just how fast or how slow his plot flows through the riverbed of his story. Understanding how to operate that dam–how to pace your story–is one of the most important tasks an author can learn. Without this skill, you end up writing stories that variously lack […]
July 5, 2009 by 22 Comments DescriptionDo You Have the Two Necessary Skills for Using Details to Bring Your Fiction to Life?
Most of the time when we think of great stories, we think of just that: stories. We don’t often think about the bits and pieces that make up the composite whole, the 206 different bones beneath the polished flesh, the mosaic chips that form the complete picture. But it’s these bits, bones, and chips that decide whether a story […]
November 20, 2008 by 27 Comments Description3 Ways Colors Can Transform Your Writing
Arguably, no single descriptive attribute can transform your writing as quickly as color. We can spend hundreds of words laboring over a description of a springtime meadow or a shipwrecked boat, when a single color is all it takes to burst the scene upon the reader’s eye with perfect clarity. Consider the following quotations: Then, still […]
