One of the bits of advice that is often given to would-be writers is “Use strong verbs.” Apart from my usual allergy to rules and generalizations, one of the things that bothers me about this is that I’ve seldom seen anyone try to explain what it means, and on the rare occasions when someone does, [...]
August 15, 2012 – 6:11 am
First off, it has been brought to my attention (thanks, John!) that I need to tell my regular readers that The Far West is now out and available in hardcover. The e-book will be out in October, they tell me. On to the post. Back in the day, one of my earliest beta-readers took me [...]
January 11, 2012 – 6:48 am
Once again, I have been driven to frothing at the mouth by a would-be writer-and-critiquer’s thick-headedness in regard to both the construction of the English language and the so-called rules he’s trying to apply, and you folks are going to have to put up with the resulting rant. My apologies in advance. This particular comment [...]
January 26, 2011 – 6:52 am
A quick recap, for those who are getting a little lost: Fiction (and the English language generally) is built up by combining smaller units into larger and larger ones according to various rules and principles, the same way you build large, intricate Lego models by putting a few relatively simple blocks together into more and [...]
January 23, 2011 – 2:58 am
Clauses are the next step up from phrases, and they are intimately connected with sentences. They come in two varieties, independent and dependent, and the first sort is a sentence, or could be if you punctuated it differently. “He ran, but she escaped.” is a single sentence built out of two independent clauses with a [...]
January 19, 2011 – 6:00 am
Before I go on, I would like to remind everybody once again that the vast majority of authors do not consciously and deliberately micro-manage their writing to wring every last bit of strength out of every word’s position, rhythm, etc. Most of the time, we work by feel – this way feels better/stronger than that [...]
January 16, 2011 – 6:02 am
Every set of Legos has the basic square and rectangular blocks that you build most of your castles and dinosaurs and pirates with, and then a bunch of oddly shaped pieces that you use to make the fancy bits. Last post, I compared the basic Legos to the first four basic parts of speech – [...]
January 12, 2011 – 6:13 am
Words, being the smallest and most basic building blocks of fiction, have lots of useful and important properties. I’ve already talked about specificity and sound; the next really key thing a writer needs to know about words is that they have different…strength or significance. I define strong words as “the ones people pay more attention [...]
January 9, 2011 – 6:41 am
Fiction is like Legos. It’s built out of a series of different units, stuck together. Each new level of unit is built out of a clump of previous units. The more units you have, the more complex effects you can achieve by moving them around, putting them in different configurations, making different associations, etc. What [...]
January 5, 2011 – 6:09 am
“It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” – Mark Twain One of the things that a great many people seem to know for sure is that they don’t need any knowledge of the rules of grammar, punctuation, or syntax in order to write to [...]
January 21, 2010 – 4:42 pm
When professional writers are asked “what are the books you keep within arm’s reach of your desk or computer?”, many of the lists have for years included Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is also popular, as is The Chicago Manual of Style and Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s delightful The Deluxe [...]
November 24, 2009 – 11:26 am
The second most common way of leading into and out of a flashback sequence is by shifting tenses. Most novels are told in what’s called the “historic present,” meaning that the “now” of the story is told in simple past tense (He slept in the library all afternoon rather than He sleeps in the library all afternoon). This confuses a lot [...]
I have just finished arguing with a would-be writer who a) is convinced that passive voice is evil and must be avoided at all times, and b) has, it turns out, no idea at all what passive voice actually is. I am therefore going to rant. Passive voice is not when something has been allowed [...]