writing
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Simile: a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared, as in “she is like a rose”. Similes are useful as a descriptive shortcut. They rely on the reader understanding what qualities a rose has that might be applied to a woman. Is it that she is a particular colour? Capable of…
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Writer Unboxed has a recent post on warm versus cool writing which made me rethink some of the things that I’ve heard and read about writing. Cool writing, as illustrated by the work of Ernest Hemingway, is dominated by ‘showing, not telling’; action and narration are prominent with the reader left to infer what the…
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Have to have a job to pay the bills, but it’s far away and I spend three hours a day commuting. J is for Job in the sense that I don’t get paid for writing and I like to have nice stuff. But there’s also an element in which having a job meets some emotional…
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I’ve been stuck on H for ages. When I originally made my list, I thought I might talk about health, about whether your health is good, bad or variable and what impact that has on your writing. But the more I thought about the content of the post, the more it felt like whining. So,…
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Jeffrey Archer is an easy target. He’s a best-selling author that a lot of people think is a dreadful writer. So, given that I read in order to improve my writing skills, it seems to make sense that I should read some of those novels and authors that are widely considered to be bad. I can see…
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I’m not sure where I picked it up but I had a belief that if you had a talent for something, then it should come easily to you. If you were good at art, then drawing well and finding things to draw would be a snitch. You’d sit down at your easel and knock off…
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Writing prose with emotion is hard for me. I start off with scenes that are flat and emotionless. My characters are acting and talking as if what is happening isn’t touching them emotionally. It’s as if they don’t care and are just shrugging it off. Are they fighting for their lives against a winged demon?…
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Oh, there’s just so much of it! The things I could spend my time doing: Watching tvPlaying video gamesMessing about on the internetHanging out with friendsGetting a master’s degreePlaying with my catsDancingReading non-writing related blogs and newsWatching butterfliesLOLcats And of course there are the things I think I should be doing: CleaningDecoratingHanging out with friendsKeeping…
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I like to analyse stuff. This week I have some time off from my day job and I am working on my novel. For me, this means looking at the 65,000 words of scenes that I have and trying to work out in what order they should go. So I have scene cards and a spreadsheet,…
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Over the years I’ve been involved in writing groups I’ve found myself in conversations about how much technique matters. It appears there are two schools of thought. On one side are those who think it doesn’t matter much. They argue that worrying about correct spelling and formatting kills the creative flow and it’s much more…
Boudica Marginalia 