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What makes a story… a story?
I’ve spent a great deal of time wondering about the difference between “a story” and, “a sequence of events that happen to a character.” Those might appear to be synonyms, but they are not. A story — a good one, anyway — is more than just a slice of someone’s life. It does more…
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The Craft of #Writing: Beware the Adverb Nazis.
Pro-Writing Aid, an online program that analyzes your writing and gives you recommendations to improve it.As I was looking at a report on a piece it gave the number of adverbs and recommended that I remove three. I must have missed this before but I do tend to use the old editor, instead of…
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Just Keep Swimming
Time for a(nother) quick writer’s block rant. There is a fair amount of wisdom in Finding Nemo, believe it or not. As a new father confronting the world of hyper-protective parenting and we-don’t-keep-score-at-games-so-nobody-ever-has-to-lose mentality, etc, I’ve given a little thought to Dory: Marlin: I promised I’d never let anything happen to him. Dory: Hmm.…
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The Art of #Writing–Audit Your Novel’s #StoryStructure
You’ve sweated, plotted and struck the nubs of your fingers into your keyboard enough times to wear indentations into the keys. The first draft is in your hands. What do you do now? You fix it. Even best selling authors have to repair their story structure. Kevin Hearn gives a nice accounting about the…
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The Art of #Writing: #Plotting and #Pacing Using #Scrivener
You’ve plotted or pants your way through your novel, spent long months of taking your hero or heroine from there to back again, and then you read it. And die a little inside. Because even though you’ve created engaging characters, put them in gut twisting situations, and gave them a resolution that makes you…
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Distractions
It seems that my blog rolls in a cycle I talk about goals, targets, what my plans are and how I’m going to achieve them. The next week I’m back making excuses, explaining why nothing came to fruition, accepting failure and doing better the next time. (I swear this time I’ve got a really…
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Interview with the #Scifi #author
Oh no. No one actually interviewed me. But over at Fantasy-Writers.org a member posted a thread asking us about how we started as writers and then added a few more questions. It evolved into an interview of sorts so here goes: 1.How did everyone get their start in writing fantasy? It was a confluence…
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ZERO
Just thought I would throw out an update (Mainly because it is relevant to my last two posts) On Monday aiming for my target of 500 words I wrote the magnificent figure of zero. Yes you did read correctly I wrote zero words. Absolutely nothing. Zilch. Sweet fanny Adams. I failed, but today though…