Now what will you do with it?
This past week, news came of the death of a novelist whose name appeared on numerous dozens of books. For decades, each debuted on the best-seller list.
But that’s not how he started. The opportunity arose when his wife took a job that had her work the late shift. Once, he’d put his children to bed, what … Continue reading
Readers don’t want filler.
“Vigorous writing is concise,” says William Strunk Jr. in his classic book The Elements of Style. “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that … Continue reading
… including its clichés.
How well should you know your fiction genre? Well enough to know not only its expectations, but also its overused elements.
If you’re writing romance, you should be familiar enough with what others have published that you avoid like the plague the well-worn technique of having two potential love interests literally bump into each other.