Written? Kitten! 36 Writing Essays by Chuck Palahniuk 1: Establishing Your Authority Chuck teaches two principal methods for building a narrative voice your readers will believe in. Discover the Heart Method and the Head Method and how to employ each to greatest effect. 2: Developing a Theme At the core of Minimalism is focusing any piece of writing to support one or two major themes. 3: Using “On-The-Body” Physical Sensation Great writing must reach both the mind and the heart of your reader, but to effectively suspend reality in favor of the fictional world, you must communicate on a physical level, as well. 4: Submerging the “I” First-person narration, for all its immediacy and power, becomes a liability if your reader can't identify with your narrator. 5: Nuts and Bolts: Hiding a Gun Sometimes called "plants and payoffs" in the language of screenwriters, Hiding a Gun is an essential skill to the writer's arsenal that university writing courses almost never touch upon. 6: Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs 8: Nuts and Bolts: Using Choruses
short stories at east of the web A game of Scrabble has serious consequences. - Length: 4 pages - Age Rating: PG - Genre: Crime, Humor A semi-barbaric king devises a semi-barabaric (but entirely fair) method of criminal trial involving two doors, a beautiful lady and a very hungry tiger. - Length: 7 pages - Genre: Fiction, Humor ‘Bloody hell!’ - Genre: Humor Looking round he saw an old woman dragging a bucket across the floor and holding a mop. - Length: 3 pages Henry pours more coal onto the hearth as a gust of wind rattles through the cracked window frame. - Length: 14 pages - Genre: Horror ulissa Ye relished all the comfortable little routines and quietude defining her part-time job at The Bookery, downtown’s last small, locally-owned bookstore. - Length: 8 pages - Age Rating: U The forest looked ethereal in the light from the moon overhead. - Length: 15 pages - Age Rating: 18 Corporal Earnest Goodheart is crouched in a ditch on the edge of an orchard between Dunkirk and De Panne. - Genre: Fiction - Length: 20 pages
365 tomorrows : A New Free Flash Fiction SciFi Story Every Day Place Names Let's say you've created a fictitious tavern, hamlet, village, town, city, realm, kingdom or planet for your story but you can't think of what to name it. Or the name you came up with for your fictitious tavern, hamlet, village, town city, realm, kingdom or planet makes your critique partner snort coffee out of her nose. Either way, you're in trouble. Let's cruise around some of the online place name generators, see how they can help, and grade them accordingly. 1. Trying out The English Place Name Generator produced Broad Croft Manor, Little Sex Plain (Freudian slip from a frustrated male?) Generator Grade: Okay to good. 2. Generator Grade Range: Eh to okay. 3. Generator Grade Range: Okay to good. 4. Generator Grade Range: Okay to good. 5. Generator Grade Range: Great to excellent. 6. Generator Grade Range: Okay to good. Seventh Sanctum offers some different place name generators: 7. Generator Grade Range: Eh to okay. 8. Generator Grade Range: Okay to good. 9. 10.
Victoria's Advice Column Hi Victoria, I am a poet and the editor of a community journal of literature and visual art. We publish short prose and poetry, as well as the work of local artists. This is an annual, and we have just completed our twelfth journal. It is published by a not-for-profit organization, and my position as editor-in-chief is unpaid. I have also done some paid freelance editorial work for people I have met through the journal. Hi, Judith! My work is both similar to and different from yours. Certainly, my background in editing technical manuals helps enormously with Copy Editing, as yours in editing law books must. However, the real work I do—Developmental Editing and Line Editing fiction and memoir—takes years to learn properly. I know there are, right now, almost as many aspiring editors hoping to break into freelance editing as there are aspiring writers hoping to break into publication. So your competition is enormous. So that’s how I did it. I love my job.
Show Some Character! -- Forty-five more flaws that expose your lack of storytelling experience, part 1 So the other day, someone tweeted this post from storyfix.com containing five writing mistakes that, as they put it (and hat-tip to them for the title of this post), “expose your lack of storytelling experience.” I retweeted the link, adding that the real number was probably more like 50 than 5. Twitter people being who they are, now I’m on the hook for the other 45. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Ok. On to part 2 > Internet Resources - Writers Resources - Writing Links & Writers Links for Writers - Word Stuff Unsorted [/writers] James Patrick Kelly - Murder Your Darlings - "When time comes to make that final revision, however, you must harden your heart, sharpen the ax and murder your darlings." Greda Vaso - Determining the Readability of a Book - includes formulas for Gunning's Fog Index, Flesch Formula, Powers Sumner Kearl L. Kip Wheeler - Literary Terms and Definitions L. Style - Grammar - Errors in English [/writers]American Heritage - Book of English Usage - free download Band-Aid AP StylebookPaul Brians - Common Errors in EnglishCJ Cherryh - Writerisms and other Sins The Chicago Manual of Style FAQ Gary N.
5 editor’s secrets to help you write like a pro I do a lot of copyediting, both of books and advertising collateral. I’ll let you in on a secret that still surprises me, although I’ve seen it hundreds of times now. If you looked at the raw work of most professional writers, you’d be pretty underwhelmed. Professional writers get work because they hit their deadlines, they stay on message, and they don’t throw too many tantrums. Professional writers rely on editors to fix their clunks. Editing, like writing, takes time to learn. 1. Have you ever heard a four-year-old run out of breath before she can finish her thought? Sentences are building blocks, not bungee cords; they’re not meant to be stretched to the limit. 2. A paragraph supports a single idea. 3. Nouns ending in -ing are fine. (If for some insane reason you want to get all geeky about this, you can read the Wikipedia article on gerunds and present participles. 4. I know we all heard this in high school, but we weren’t listening. 5. Bonus: Use spell-check
The Easiest, Cheapest, Fastest Way to Self-Publish Your Book You are excited to self-publish, but sorting through the sheer quantity of offerings, claims, and technologies is overwhelming. I spend a good part of each week researching the topic and, for authors of trade paperback books with no or few illustrations, my answer is to use these two services for creating your e-book and print book: Smashwords and CreateSpace. Create Your Smashwords E-Book Smashwords, which I’ve written about before, continues to be a very popular e-book publishing service. Open a free account (they take 10% of sales), and provide all the data about your book (title, description, price, key word tags, cover, etc.). Then upload a properly formatted Microsoft Word .doc file containing your book interior. Hire Out Smashwords Formatting, Cover Design Formatting the Smashwords .doc file is simple but tedious and can be a little frustrating to non-geeks, so they’ve compiled a list of people who will do that for you who charge from $25 an hour and up. What Does All This Cost?