Tag Archives: style

Formal and informal

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 [...]

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Writing and Learning styles

May 23, 2012 – 6:15 am

Last Sunday, I was having so much fun going through Mom’s old writing books that I promised a couple more posts on the subject…forgetting that I was going to be out of town until the end of Wiscon. So you’ll have to wait a week for me to talk about the changes in the way [...]

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More than repetition

April 3, 2011 – 6:09 am

“There’s more to the theater than repetition. There’s more to the theater than repetition. There’s more to the theater than repetition… “But not much!”  – The Flying Karamozov Brothers   There are some basic things about writing that people who’ve done it for a while tend to take for granted. I was reminded of one [...]

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The Lego Theory, Part 7

January 30, 2011 – 6:05 am

OK, you twisted my arm. But I’m stopping at scenes. Really. As I said, paragraphs are where this analogy switches from looking at building blocks to looking at what you are building out of the building blocks. Consequently, the main properties of paragraphs aren’t so much about the paragraphs as a unit; they’re more about [...]

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The Lego Theory, Part 6

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 [...]

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The Lego Theory Part 5

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 [...]

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The Lego Theory, Part 4

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 [...]

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Lightning and the Lightning Bug

November 14, 2010 – 6:38 am

A bit over a hundred years ago, Mark Twain made the famous remark that “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.”  At around the same time, Gustave Flaubert came up with his le seule mot juste [the only right word], which seems [...]

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Search-and-Destroy

October 24, 2010 – 2:50 pm

I wrote my first novel on a typewriter, and one of my most vivid memories of that is proofreading the final submission draft and trying to decide, over and over, whether it was worth retyping a whole page in order to get rid of one too-common word or phrase. Mostly, it wasn’t. When I got [...]

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