Sixfold

I am entered in the fall 2019 Sixfold competition. Sixfold is writer-reviewed. I was assigned six stories to rank and review. I was impressed by how few grammar errors I found. The grammar quality is far above most of the submissions that come to the online publication that I slush read for. I didn’t expect that and I don’t know what this means. Are these stories well workshopped and fixed? […]

Strengths and Weakness of your writing

What are your strengths and weakness as a writer? You might look at: Characters Setting Plot How would you rate yourself on a scale of 1 – 10? How do others see you? Then, what about: Dialogue Conflict Prose Theme Description But then there’s also: Variety Flow Balance Structure And even within the elements there are sub-characteristics, such as for Character: Believablity Interest Consistency Depth And the same with all […]

Effects to Cause

Start with an event, a cause. This cause will result in an incident, but don’t decide on the incident yet. the cause may be minor; Joe stops to look in the pet store window. the cause may be major; Joe drives his car through a red light. Determine a cause for that cause. Joe lost his transit pass and has to walk Determine a cause for that cause, perhaps bringing […]

To help you edit, reverse your sentence order

Here’s how to make your computer help you find grammar and line editing problems. Awkward phrases, missing words, repeated words in close proximity, and repeated sentence length will be much more obvious and easier to identify to fix. It requires Word, WordPad and Excel. Plus a bit of computer skills, or, just follow the instructions closely and trust my advice.  🙂 # In late drafts we need to focus on […]

Open Your Story at the Start of the Ending

“Begin at the start of the ending” is a writing aphorism. Open your story there and you set yourself up to easily carry through without losing the reader’s attention. # During a Twitter discussion on the use of literary devices, I said that I use flashback because I tend to start near the end and I need flashback to get at the history of the character and situation. One person […]

Differences between reality and fiction

Writing a story is not the same as experiencing reality. For one thing, fiction is more interesting than 99% of most people’s reality. Even creative non-fiction and memoir take reality and reshape it for presentation so it’s not boring, doesn’t include irrelevant moments, and has a coherent story or point. There are some basic differences between good writing and reality, and reasons why those differences exist.   Dialogue Fiction or […]