★★★★☆ | Writing | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A slow read over the course of a few months, one chapter/writing tool per sitting. Lots of great tips and advice to improve your writing.
Activate your verbs. Strong verbs create action, save words and reveal the players.
Watch those adverbs. “Use rarely, and then only to change the meaning of the verb.”
Take it easy on the -ings. Prefer the simple present or past.
Write in scenes and use my journal to capture the elements of those everyday scenes as moments.
“As the atom is the smallest discrete unit of matter, so the scene is the smallest discreet unit in fiction; it is the smallest bit of fiction that contains the essential elements of the story. You don’t build a story or a book of words and sentences and paragraphs — you build it of scenes, one piled on top of the next, each changing something that came before, all of them moving the story inexorably and relentlessly forward.” — Holly Lisle
Classic Story Archetypes:
- The journey there and back
- Winning the prize
- Winning or losing the loved one
- Loss and restoration
- The blessing becomes the curse
- Overcoming obstacles
- The wasteland restored
- Rising from the ashes
- The ugly duckling
- The emperor has no clothes
- Descent into the underworld
Writing Idea Questions/Criteria
- What’s the point?
- Why is this story being told?
- What does it say about life, about the world, about the times we live in?
The Writer’s Process:
- Idea
- Collect
- Focus
- Draft
- Clarify
Writer’s Block
I believe that the so-called “writing block” is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance. One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing.
— William Stafford
Find a Focus
What is your essay about? No, what is it really about? Go deeper. Get to the heart of the matter. Break the shell and extract the nut. Getting there requires careful research, sifting through evidence, experimentation, and critical thinking. The focus of a story can be expressed in a title, a first sentence, a summary paragraph, a theme statement, a thesis, a question the story will answer for the reader, one perfect word.