While you relax and enjoy your well-deserved Sunday morning rituals, here’s some advice culled from the internet on a writing, creativity, motivation and process. While your sipping orange juice, some exotic tea, a coffee confection or plain old milk, let your mind consider these tidbits and store them away for future reference.
Here’s a new way to look at your writing from The New Yorker, a piece entitled, Omission: Choosing What to Leave out:
As writers we’re charged with the responsibility of drawing the reader in, making him care about the character and identify with the characters. To do that, we must create and maintain the fictional dream. There’s an article on that on the website in the Writers’ Aids section, but let me say here that it is through the fictional dream that a reader is transported from reading words on a page to living the events of the novel. – Vicki Hinze I quoted the above text from Vicki Hinze’s article, The Reason Editors Reject Manuscripts. Since I am pursuing the e-book/self publishing route, I … Continue reading Maintaining the Fictional Dream
“Write 10,000 Words Everyday is Terrible Advice” so says @virajpatel24 on Medium.com and I agree with him. I’ve seen a lot of posts lately here and on Medium.com about word counts mixed in with advice about how to write. These posts came up during a search for editing/revising advice and curiosity made me read them. Who doesn’t like free advice? Write 10,000 words in one day. I’ve actually blown past that limit in one twenty-four hour period but I couldn’t uncurl the fingers on my right hand at the end of that session. My hand had locked up from too much abuse. I had … Continue reading How much should you write every day?
I have killed all three hundred and eighty words that end with ‘ly’. Yes those dreaded adverbs. In doing so, I found an alarming pattern. Here’s my top ‘ly’ offenders, in order of assassinations: suddenly, actually, exactly and finally. Now I know what to watch out for. What are yours top offenders? What ‘ly’ words sneak into your drafts while you’re typing? *** To reach the next level in my copyediting quest, I must now search out and destroy instances of ‘so’. This insidious word shows up too many times and I’m not going to take it anymore. I listened to … Continue reading Next up on the Copyedit Hit list is…
Have you killed any adverbs lately? It’s very cathartic. Just run a search for ‘ly’ and see what you find. Why am I doing this? I bought a book on copyediting to aid me in my quest to copyedit my own work. Deleting words ending in ‘ly’ or replacing them with stronger verbs, claimed the book, as good way to tighten up writing. So a ran simple search on my Google Doc just to see how many ‘ly’ words I had used. I didn’t think there were that many because I know to avoid them. An eye-opening number of items returned in … Continue reading Killing Adverbs
Dear Reader, I hope you enjoyed your Sunday. Perfect weather we had in my corner of the world today and I hope in yours too. Today’s post is not a story post, and I apologize that I can’t provide your daily dose of fantasy fiction. I ran into some technical issues with the audio book recordings. A quick G-chat with my cousin helped me to see the error of my setup. An error I’m working to correct. Tonight I hope to do another take. (Who needs sleep?) Cross your fingers that my neighbors will turn in early, and quietly, and … Continue reading Thank you for all the likes, follows, views and reads
Melinda Kucsera - USA Today Bestselling Author of Epic Fantasy Adventures 
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