Kurt Vonnegut was a great writer. He was an author with a unique voice, and he once published some of his insight with a short piece that I now want to share, titled How to write with style. He published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five non-fiction books throughout his career. After…
Active vs Passive Voice: the difference and why it matters.
Active vs passive voice is all about verbs. A verb can have an active voice or a passive voice, and it’s generally better to choose the active. The active voice makes the subject of a sentence perform the verb’s action. It makes a sentence more direct. It’s strong and more precise. The passive voice means…
Is the idea the best part of the writing process?
Nothing you write can ever be as pure or perfect as your idea. That’s the writer’s challenge, and that’s what keeps me up at night. It keeps me alive. This lifelong pursuit of perfection. How can I express on the page the strange feeling that carried itself into my daydream? Turning this intangible idea into…
Planning a novel (a step-by-step guide).
In my previous post, How to plan a novel, I answered a subscriber request to discuss planning a novel. I shared my process, which is on the light side of planning until the right vehicle for my character emerges. But some writers plan a significant amount of the story (sometimes the entire story) before they…
How to plan a novel.
I’m writing this post because an About Writing subscriber got in touch to request more detail on how to plan a novel. In this post, I’ll talk about my experience. In next week’s, I’ll provide a step-by-step plan that some other writers follow. The creative stereotype sometimes pigeonholes us as whimsical hedonists living from one…
How long should a novel be?
As a general rule, I believe that every work of art exists mainly in isolation, without too much regard for conventions and confining rules. If a story needs to be shorter or longer, it should be, even if that goes against advice. Some of the best novels break the rules – but they rebel with…
On Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry is notoriously difficult to translate. For non-German speakers, Rilke’s writing in Letters to a Young Poet is the closest we can get to the poet. It doesn’t only bring us closer to his writing style, but also the man and the general nature of poetry and writing. In Letters to a…
Kill Your Darlings.
For some, it’s a fundamental and obvious piece of writing advice that they’ve practiced for years. To others, it sounds odd to the extent that following it would be detrimental to your writing. Because why would you want to kill your darlings? Aren’t they supposed to be cherished and nurtured? This post will show what…
How to write a novel.
Every novelist has a unique process. A certain breed of writer can write a novel in fifteen or thirty days, some taking part in NaNoWriMo. It’s not something I’ve tried, but, time permitting, I want to in the future. It’s a good way to get down a solid first draft, writing freely without time to…
How to Edit Well: 14 Micro Editing Tips.
Here’s an editing cheat sheet. I’ve used it for almost ten years since the most influential teacher of my life handed it to me. In ‘The best writing advice anyone has given me‘ and ‘Should writers worry about offending readers,’ I shared advice from Carl Tighe and Moy McCrory. But it was Adrian Buckner, another…