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Showing posts from June, 2014

For all my fellow Rule Brakers!

7 bogus grammar 'errors' you don't need to worry about By Ben Yagoda 1. Don't split infinitives The rule against splitting infinitives — that is, putting an adverb between the word to and a verb — was pretty much made up out of whole cloth by early 19-century grammarians, apparently because they felt the proper model for English was Latin, and in Latin, infinitive-splitting is impossible. However, English is not Latin, and infinitives have been profitably split by many great writers, from Hemingway ("But I would come back to where it pleases me to live; to really live") to Gene Rodenberry  ("to boldly go where no man has gone before"). It's okay to boldly do it. 2. Don't end a sentence with a preposition The idea that it's wrong to end a sentence with a preposition (from, with , etc.) was invented ...

One Weird Trick For Cutting Down Your Novel

Book doctors don't want you to read this advice !   They don't want you to know about this foolproof advice for reducing the excess verbiage in your novel (or short story). But I'm going to share it with you, for free. Revising a work of fiction can be a nightmare, especially if your story has a lot of sprawl and a lot of passages that just go on a little too long. You've already cut the extra scenes. You've already "killed your darlings" (more on that in a moment). You've eliminated the obvious extra baggage. But you're still running too long, and too draggy. In a minute, I'll tell you the sure-fire trick for cutting the extra stuff out of your story or novel. But first I want to talk to you about writing. Most writers are part hack, part dreamer. Structure often comes from the "hack" part of your brain, leaps and surprises and vividness come from the "dreamer" part of your brain. (This is somethi...

Secrets of Publishing!!!!

Mike R. Underwood: 25 Secrets Of Publishing, Revealed! (Or: Inside The Bookish Shatterdome) Mike Underwood is good people. He does stellar work inside the hissing cyber-word factory of Angry Robot Books, and he’s also a helluva wordmonkey himself. He’s one of the authors who gets a wide open door when it comes to writing guest posts here, and when he wanted to talk about some of the “SHH SECRETS” inside the publishing industry, well, I dare not refuse him. Also he has a gun and it shoots robots — like, it actually fires tiny robots into your body and the robots, well, I dunno what they do once they’re inside you, but word on the street is “robot orgy in your aorta.” So, listen to Mike. Or he’ll shoot you with his robot orgy gun. 1) Selling a Book to a Publisher is Business/Art Dating Just because your book is awesome and sexy doesn’t mean that it’s a good match for every publishing house. Just as no one person is a perfect match for every person in the world, no matte...

Another article I found on writing...

21 Harsh But Eye-Opening Writing Tips From Great Authors by Cody Delistraty A lot of people think they can write or paint or draw or sing or make movies or what-have-you, but having an artistic temperament doth not make one an artist. Even the great writers of our time have tried and failed and failed some more. Vladimir Nabokov received a harsh rejection letter from Knopf upon submitting Lolita , which would later go on to sell fifty million copies. Sylvia Plath’s first rejection letter for The Bell Jar read, “There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.” Gertrude Stein received a cruel rejection letter that mocked her style. Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way earned him a sprawling rejection letter regarding the reasons he should simply give up writing all together. Tim Burton’s first illustrated book, The Giant Zlig , got the thumbs down from Walt Disney Productions, and even Jack Kerouac’s perennial On the Road r...

A good article I came across...

Another Word: Chasing the High — by Daniel Abraham — ( Clarkesworld Magazine)   When you start out wanting to be a writer, you’re screwed. You haven’t read enough to really understand what writing is. There are all sorts of different genres, and you may not know if you’re better at detective novels or literary vignettes or personal essays. You’re pretty impressed by some of the stuff you’ve done when you’re noodling around, but most of it’s not very good. (And you’re probably not actually sure which parts are impressive and which ones aren’t very good.) There’s a whole obscure mechanism between you and getting publishing that you’ve got no idea about, and you don’t want to look stupid. Plus, it seems like everyone you know wants to be a writer, and almost all of them fail, which is, let’s say, discouraging . The sheer volume of things you need to figure out is unmanageable and huge. Yo...