Big Picture Writers

Are the photos you submit large enough to print?

I planned to give the article feature treatment. Then I looked at the photos the author sent.

Forget any thoughts about giving a photo half-page treatment — or even three inches by five. With the low-resolution images I received, I couldn’t print them much larger than a postage stamp.

Had the magazine been online-only, I … Continue reading

Discarded Plans

Will you settle for something better?

I was really proud of the plan I’d created for the next issue of the magazine. Just a few days after sending May/June to the printer, I’d decided on good mix of articles for July/August.

Then an amazing article—a must-run item—crossed my desk. No problem; I’d swap it for my plan’s lead article and leave everything else intact.

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Competing Voices

Does your narration fit your POV character?

There was nothing wrong with the car’s fender: nice, shiny, and black. I’d not have noticed except the rest of the car was ivory.

That was much the problem with the narration in a novel I just critiqued. While the words and the sentence structure were fine, they sometimes didn’t match how the POV character … Continue reading