Themes & Things To Keep In Mind When Writing Fantasy Stories and Adventures » Daily Encounter This list is far from complete. It’s not even trying to be complete. It knows better than that. It just wants to be helpful and provide some inspiration here and there; you know, offer little suggestions that might lead to bigger ideas. (Especially by using the words offered as Wikipedia searches!) Feel free to make suggestions in the comments! Weather Natural: sunlight, rain, snow, hail, fog, humidity, moonlight, wind, smoke, clouds, shadows, overcast skies, clear skies, lightning, hurricanes, tornadoes, moon in sky during daytimeFantastic: summoned weather, unnatural coloration (eg. green fog) Terrain Changes Landmarks Natural: stone outcropping, lightening struck trees, large boulders, waterfallsArtificial: lone buildings (eg. towers, houses, barns), statues, signs/markers, border wallsFantastic: large skeletons (eg. dragons, giants) After-Effects of Events Tricks Cultures Mysticism Events Unfolding Harsh Situations fatigue, hunger, thirst, extreme temperaturesenemy territories (invading?
9 Editing Tips that Make Your Writing Sparkle It’s often said that writing is rewriting. Banging out a quick first draft can be fun, but the real grunt work comes in revising your work. Here are nine editing tips that can help you polish your writing until it sparkles: 1. Read aloud When you become too familiar with a piece of writing, suddenly it’s more difficult to spot weaknesses and errors. 2. Better than just reading your work aloud is recording yourself (most computers have a voice recording program already installed). 3. Don’t write the last word of your first draft and then launch into editing mode straight away. 4. If your sentence makes sense without using a particular word, cut it. 5. “A passive construction occurs when you make the object of an action into the subject of a sentence,” says this university web resource. 6. Have you ever re-read a piece of your writing, only to find you’ve used the same word twice in the same sentence, or three times in the same paragraph? 7. 8. 9. Polished Writing
681 Cliches to Avoid in Your Creative Writing Cliches (properly spelled clichés, with the acute accent) are words and phrases, once interesting, which have lost their original effect from overuse. They are considered trite and should be avoided in writing unless used purposely for effect. We all use them without thinking, sometimes because they fit the bill or are just the ticket (both cliches), but usually because they're metaphors, idiom, or truisms that have become so common we no longer notice them. If we say better late than never or speak of someone being down in the dumps , we likely won't register that we just used a cliche. Speech is filled with shortcuts as we aim to make ourselves understood. Check the cliches below to see if you're prone to using them. Writing that relies heavily on cliches is considered poor or lazy writing. The list of cliches below is not meant to be comprehensive, but should help you catch some of the more common cliches in use. Cliche list A-K:
Ten rules for writing fiction Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin 1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. 2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. 3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. 4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" ... he admonished gravely. 5 Keep your exclamation points under control. 6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". 7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. 9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. 10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing I read this cool article last week — “30 Things To Stop Doing To Yourself” — and I thought, hey, heeeey, that’s interesting. Writers might could use their own version of that. So, I started to cobble one together. And, of course, as most of these writing-related posts become, it ended up that for the most part I’m sitting here in the blog yelling at myself first and foremost. That is, then, how you should read this: me, yelling at me. Then go forth and kick your writing year in the teeth. Onto the list. 1. Right here is your story. 2. Momentum is everything. 3. You have a voice. 4. Worry is some useless shit. 5. The rise of self-publishing has seen a comparative surge forward in quantity. 6. I said “stop hurrying,” not “stand still and fall asleep.” 7. It’s not going to get any easier, and why should it? 8. 9. The mind is the writer’s best weapon. 10. Complaining — like worry, like regret, like that little knob on the toaster that tells you it’ll make the toast darker — does nothing. 11.
How to Write a Horror Story: 11 steps Adjunct Assistant Professor of English This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD. Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. Co-authors: 169 Updated: March 23, 2020 Views: 1,019,210 Article SummaryX One way to write a horror story is by brainstorming things or situations that scare you. Did this summary help you?
Stephen King’s Top 7 Tips for Becoming a Better Writer If you want to learn how to write better where do you go? Well, you can take a creative writing course. Or read the books, biographies and studies of men and women hailed as literary geniuses throughout history. For today, I’ve chosen to take some advice from one the most popular fiction writers of the last few decades: Stephen King. Now, great sales figures aren’t always an indication of greatness in any field. But it probably means that the creator knows what s/he is doing and what works. , The Long Walk or The Running Man – are really good reads (and sometimes even greater films I’ve learned/been reminded about these seven tips by rereading King’s memoir/how-to-write book On Writing – highly recommended for many good insights into writing and a writer’s life – and by a whole bunch of his novels I’ve sacrificed sleep to keep on reading. 1. Don’t waste your reader’s time with too much back-story, long intros or longer anecdotes about your life. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. How do you find time to read more?
Eight Secrets Which Writers Won’t Tell You Image from Flickr by Lazurite This is not particularly relevant to the post, but I’m getting an awful lot of comments telling me, often a little snarkily, “it’s ‘THAT’ not ‘WHICH’”. The “don’t use which for restrictive clauses” rule comes (as far as I can tell) from Strunk and White. Plenty of authors, including Austen, have used “which” exactly as I use it in the title. It’s very commonly used like this here in England, so I’m guessing my comments are coming from US readers. There was never a period in the history of English when “which” at the beginning of a restrictive relative clause was an error. I thought about putting “that” in the title – but I like the sound of “which” between “secrets” and “writers”. And with that out of the way, enjoy the post! A few years ago, I’d look at published writers and think that they were somehow different from me. They were real writers. I’m going to go through eight secrets. Secret #1: Writing is Hard The truth is, though, that writing is hard.