Choose your weapon wisely! Once you’ve got a fiction or nonfiction piece ready for prime-time, there may still be a word count limit you have to worry about. It may be a restriction imposed on you by the publisher, or you may want to get your piece as short and concise as possible- not just for simplicity’s sake, but also to reduce its overall file size. A smaller file size means a larger per-sale commission when you sell your work…
Any tool can be used goodly or badly! Why are adverbs “bad?” Well, to be fair, they’re not. They’re quite simple and clear in their meaning, and are very common in ordinary speech. However, some are severely overused in prose, making it plodding and tiresome to read. Some are extremely extraneous. And some tell what you can easily be showing instead. One good way to step up your writing is to strike and swap out adverbs- when it makes sense…
I’ve read Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time at least a dozen times since I was eight years old. One passage in particular has always stuck with me: Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness, the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure….
We hear it all the time: show, don’t tell. And most of the time, that’s solid advice. But there are occasions where a tell is necessary, or just a better idea: for the sake of brevity, backstory, worldbuilding, your series theme song, that sort of thing. The way to do tells is to weave them in as seamlessly and naturally as possible. They should be ninja, dropping information into your readers’ minds without anyone being the wiser. Why? Because an…