ON THE EVE of National Novel Writing Month or National NonFiction Writing Month (affectionately known as NaNoWriMo or NaNonFiWriMo, respectively), the issue of productivity becomes more than important than ever. After all, how will you meet the challenge of writing 50,000 words of fiction or completing a nonfiction piece in one […]
DO YOU WANT your writing to take hold of your readers and pull them from one page to the next? Do you want to imbue your writing with more tension, movement, and power? One of the most potent ways to strengthen your writing is to use strong, precise, and active verbs […]
USE OF the singular “their” and “they” drives me nuts. There. I said it. In case you don’t what I’m talking about, here’s an example: Someone left their mess in the kitchen. They should clean it up. Here’s another: Everyone knows they should tell the truth. The rule is pretty simple: Use […]
MOST WRITERS have day jobs. That’s a fact. There are those who begin writing in earnest after retirement or who are fortunate enough to be supported by other means or who manage to carve out a writing career when they are young, but these are the minority. A quick web […]
WRITERS tend to use the terms “revision” and “copyediting” interchangeably, but there are some important differences between the two; they are separate activities accomplished at different stages of the writing process, and both are important to crafting a good piece of writing. What are they, how are they different, and why […]
WHEN IT COMES TO WRITING MEMOIR, the most frequently asked question I receive is, “How do I start?” My brief answer is, “You start by starting. You write what comes. Don’t worry about the form or the content at this point. Just write.” And that’s true. But what would-be memoirists […]
A good writer can conjure a landscape and its peoples to live inside you, and the best writers make you feel they’ve disclosed their soft underbellies. — Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir WHEN YOU READ A MEMOIR, what about that author’s story evokes emotion in you? What makes the […]
Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It’s not; it’s a deliberate construction. ~ William Zinsser, On Writing Well (30th Anniversary Edition) I am often […]
What could be simpler to understand than the act of people writing about what they know best, their own lives? But this apparently simple act is anything but simple, for the writer becomes, in the act of writing, both the observing subject and the object of investigation, remembrance, and contemplation. […]
In the previous installment of this series, we examined the strong verb and its importance to our story’s tone and pace. In this post, we’ll look at figurative language — metaphor. What exactly is metaphor? Metaphor compares abstract concepts to familiar objects and is the mechanism by which we understand those […]
You have been working on ways to remember and write your life story vividly, with concrete and sensory details that draw your reader into the world of your story. Now, consider how the verbs you choose effect tone and pace. In the midst of a story, when you describe a static object, you are in […]
This is the fourth in a series on turning memories into memoirs (and memoir-related essays). Click here to read Memories to Memoirs, Part 1, Memories to Memoirs, Part 2, and Memories to Memoirs, Part 3. In Part 3 I wrote about the importance of including vivid details in your writing and gave you […]
