Kill your darlings. This is one of the most popular pieces of writing advice of all time. I don’t know why this specific piece of writing advice rose to the top out of the entire book Stephen King’s writing advice, but it is one of the biggest. Now, Stephen King does know how to write. […]
Should You Kill Your Darlings? Read More »
I love dialogue. Have I ever told you I love dialogue, because, dang, I love dialogue. Dialogue is the aspect of writing that sticks out more than anything, and it is the type of writing we remember. What do you remember from the movies? What do people quote from books? Most times it is dialogue.
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Omit unneeded words. This is a famous piece of writing advice from The Elements of Style by William Strunk, and his little manual on writing might be the most famous book on writing to exist. But is the advice above good advice. On Today’s episode of How to write good, I am going to talk
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What is the best part of a book? Or maybe I should ask another question: what is the core of a story? I would say the answer to that question is character. Who am I journeying with? Who am I getting to know. Now, you most likely learned a specific way to describe characters in
Three Strategies for Writing Characters Read More »
Tension. That is the good stuff. If we can create tension in our stories, we can grab those readers, and if we can grab those readers, we can rule the world with a microphone (Or a piece of paper. Something like that. It doesn’t really matter). But if we can create tension in our story,
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We write from two different viewpoints in English. We either write in first person or third person. And some people have very strong feelings about writing in one or the other of these tenses. I don;t really care. I think they both useful, and I am willing to write in either. In this episode of
This is a piece of life advice, but it is also something that is good to remember when you are writing: fall in love with learning. Benjerman Frankerlman once said that if you want to be remembered you either need to do something worth writing about or write something worth reading. Since we are not
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I was going to make this episode about how to finish your book. In the future, I will actually make an episode about that, but when I was going through this topic, I found I had something I needed to say about the act of writing itself. Specifically, I thought it was very important to
Why Writing Frustrates You Read More »
Cowboy hats. Metal walls with rivets. Redshirts. Duels. Towering skycrapers. There are many tropes that show up in stories. Where these show up depends up which type of story they are in. Because these things have been used over and over again, people have learned to hate them. But if you are one of those
Should you use tropes? Read More »
What shoot you shoot for when writing? What is the goal of the writing? My first answer to that question would be to make someone understand what you are thinking. Another way of saying this is that you are trying to express things as clearly as possible. Besides this goal, I have another goal that
