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Take 5 Friday: Advice from Greek Mythology
By Christine Hennebury (with contributions from Alex Drodge) This week’s Take 5 Friday is brought to you courtesy of storytelling, my love for ‘transferable skills,’ and my 18 year old’s course in Greek Mythology this past semester. While the characters in Greek mythology are known for things that have little or nothing to do with writing, I’ve decided to ask a few mythological figures for some writing advice this week. Artemis – Goddess of Wild Animals and the Hunt (and lots of other things) While there is little physical danger in the hunting of words, there is still the potential for peril. That is why you must choose your targets…
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Thirteen Reasons Why Your Next Draft Should Be Written Badly
By choosing to write badly, you’re leaving all those fears and anxieties of “is this good enough?” at the door. There’s freedom in choosing to write badly. Even if you only have 10-minute increments to write in, decide when you sit down that this work-in-progress will be messy and bland.
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Signs You May Be an Unrealistic Writer
It's easy to encourage authors who are humble, teachable and willing to work hard. It's much difficult to encourage an aspiring writer who is unrealistic about their talent, the work demands and the industry of writing.
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A Writer’s Guide To Ruthlessly Killing Your Darlings
In the world of writers, killing your darlings means getting rid of those story bits that need to die, even though the author may have fallen in love with them.
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Take 5 Friday: 5 Ways That Focused TV Watching Can Help Your Writing
by Christine Hennebury Spending a lot more time watching TV, Netflix, or YouTube these days? You aren’t alone. A lot of us are entertaining and distracting ourselves with favourite shows, old and new, and taking comfort in knowing that the plotlines will be resolved, one way or another. If you are watching TV and thoroughly enjoying yourself, then have at it. However, if you are getting a little twitchy or feeling like you *should* be writing but you can’t quite stir yourself to open your work-in-progress, perhaps you can start by letting your favourite TV writers and actors inform your own writing. Here are 5 categories of observations to make…
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Eight Ways To Make Your Writing Funnier
What makes something funny? There are no guarantees in humor. Professional comedians spend years trying to find the material that "kills" but what works in Cleveland may not work in Kalamazoo.
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Finding Inspiration Through RAFT Writing
RAFT writing is a creative writing exercise that was designed to make you consider different perspectives and formats for your writing.
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Seven Reasons Why You Should Read Your Manuscript Out Loud
I'm completely convinced that you'll make a lot of notes. I'm convinced that you'll hear far more errors than you'll ever see. Reading aloud reveals everything.
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Five Alliterative Responses From Your Emotionally Abusive Antagonist
It is a sad, but true fact that I used to know a narcissist intimately. In the course of this relationship, I noticed a pattern in the way that they would respond to me and I called it the “Four Is”. Yes, the title of this piece says five, but the fifth one is not really a response.
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What To Do With Too Much Writing Advice
Generally speaking, writers are isolated introverts, hiding from the real world, wrapping themselves up in their imaginary lands, fighting dragons, discovering treasure and falling in love. It’s a lonely place. It could be that they withdraw from the real world as an act of personal survival.
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Five Things You Can Do If You Are Stuck In Your Story
f you're stuck figuratively in the writing of your novel and you need a clue on what to do next, this list is for you.
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How The “There Are No Rules” Rule Can Set You Up For Failure & Mockery
Rules for grammar, spelling, and punctuation bring order and dignity to our language. There are also rules for storytelling, rules for submissions, rules of common sense, rules of general communication that YOU MUST follow if you want to be taken seriously.
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Take 5 Friday: 5 ways writing is like shoveling snow
We’re having a ridiculous winter here on the east coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. We’ve had over 350 centimeters (148 inches) of snow since winter began in November (we had almost 100 centimeters in one 24 hour period in late January) and we have more snow coming on the weekend. Earlier this week, I doing some shoveling after the latest storm and it occurred to me that shoveling snow and writing have a lot in common. Standing in a driveway looking at mounds of snow is not unlike looking at a blank page. You can’t know how long it will take but all you can do is dig in and…
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How To Make Words More Beautiful
As we write, we can organize our words in such a way that their patterns, their meaning, their rhythm, their structure, and their message all sing together. Beautiful words, in prose, cannot be accidents. Finely crafted words come with discipline and practice. Lovely sentences do not lay on the page passively waiting for an optic nerve to come by and give them life. Beautiful sentences dance — they vary in their length, in their structure, in the vivacity of their verbs and in the nuances of their nouns. These words paint a picture — they don’t slap it together.