Category: Writing and What-not’s

https://babyboomertales.podbean.com/e/ep-159-the-tractor/ A great reminder to Never stop trying: At age 23, Tina Fey was working at a YMCA.At age 23, Oprah was fired from her first reporting job.At age 24, Stephen King was working as a janitor and living in a trailer.At age 27, Vincent …

I’m constantly amazed at writers who come to our writers group or any group with a story they’ve written to have it critiqued. From the first it’s easy to tell whether they’ve really serious about having others opinions or they just there to have their egos stroked. They sit …

Amateur writers wind up succumbing to at least one major pitfall, the use of adverbs in dialogue tags.  Adverbs are those pesky –ly words that modify verbs. For example: happily replied. said angrily. quickly asked. pensively said. In fiction, adverbs tend to weaken your writing. …

Writing success boils down to hard work, imagination and passion—and then some more hard work. Here are 25 writing tips from some best selling fiction authors. Print a copy to put on your desk, home office, refrigerator door, or somewhere else noticeable so you can …

We all use description in our writing. We describe characters and settings, actions and reactions. Most of what we write is description of some sort. By using the 5 senses, we can broaden our descriptions from a list of attributes to an experience for our …

A popular idiom “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” might be true in an idealistic sense, but it usually refers to judging people by their appearance. There is a reality for publishers and the book industry in general. For the vast majority of readers the …

Deep POV is the third-person subjective taken a step beyond the normal third-person subjective. Deep POV shows your story through the eyes of one or more characters—one at a time please, avoid any head-hopping. Deep POV goes into the head and heart of a character, taking your readers beyond the …

I started to write an article on dialogue, but in research, I found this article on the Reader’s Digest site and I could never say it better than Ms. Trupkiewicz. This is a copy of her article on dialogue. The link to the article is:http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/keep-it-simple-keys-to-realistic-dialogue-part-ii The following …

1. Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. (This is a famous ad jingle?) 2. He spends money like a drunken sailor. 3. He lied on the witness stand like one would expect a guilty person to do. 4. My cousin looks like Greta Garbo. …

If you’re beginning a new story, you need to figure out three things at the start.  First, where does your story start?  It doesn’t start with the weather or a prologue, giving six to ten pages of back story.  What is the inciting incident that …