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Showing posts 121 to 130 (163 total)

Writing Superstitions (March 3, 2014)

Writing can be a very depressing business. You spend your evenings and weekends hunched over your keyboard, trying in vain to make a sucky novel slightly less sucky. You love writing, but you despise writing. You dread it. You feel guilty if you don't do it. You resent your day job because you can't do it more. You keep at it through years of rejections and one-star reviews, clinging to the tiniest hope that your work will one day pay off. More »

What I Learned from Bianca Goes to NYC (February 26, 2014)

I was interested enough in Bianca Goes to NYC to pay for it—yes, pay for it—instead of waiting on the holds list of my local library as usual. And I liked it. I really did. But I'm disappointed because I could have loved it with a few rewrites. It was so, so close to being great, but it settled for okay. More »

Agents: Rumors vs. Reality (February 23, 2014)

I queried literary agents for the first time in my freshman year of college. I had spent my senior year of high school writing a very confused novel about a girl who goes insane. "Terrible" doesn't begin to describe it. Sweetie found it on an old memory drive, skimmed a few pages, and asked me if I was high on drugs when I wrote it. "No," I said, "but close—I was writing under the influence of adolescence." More »

Things That Make Me Want to Write (February 10, 2014)

What is a girl with grand aspirations of mass market publication to do when cooped in for an unexpected five-day weekend? Write, of course! At least, that's what I'd like to say. But sometimes, even when you have all the free time in the world, you just can't get into the groove. More »

Hobbyist, Professional...Who Cares? (February 9, 2014)

Recently, there's been an alarming trend on writing blogs to draw a line in the sand between "professional" writers and "hobbyist" writers. Some bloggers have always spent an inordinate amount of time trying to tell people they're not "real" writers if they don't do X, Y, or Z, but starting around New Years, when people were making their 2014 writing resolutions, it started to get especially bad. More »

Writing for Young People (February 7, 2014)

As I've been outlining, I've been thinking about the differences between writing for adults vs. young people, and about the differences in my interpretation of media as a child vs. now. More »

BS Writing Advice: Ideals vs. Reality (December 15, 2013)

Here are some common pieces of advice that writers love to pass around because they support warm and fuzzy artistic ideals, and not because they're true. More »

Historical Romance: A Subgenre of "Fantasy" (December 7, 2013)

Balls. Arranged marriages. Corsets. Top hats. Chaperones. London. Brighton. Grand mansions in the quaint English countryside. Handsome footmen. Pretty ladies' maids. Bawdy lower classes using funny cockney slang. Proper upper classes using archaic speech patterns. Swords. Horse-drawn carriages. And, occasionally, pirates. More »

Two Signs of Faux Conflicts (November 27, 2013)

We all know that conflict is the basis of story. Right? Right. Without conflict, a plot is just a flat series of events. With conflict, a plot is a meaningful series of events constituting rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. A story without conflict is boring. Many would say it isn't a story at all. More »

Tragedy: The Backbone of Comedy (October 23, 2013)

In eighth grade English, we sampled Shakespeare by reading Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. I remember exactly two lessons from the semester. More »