July 23, 2013 at 11:48 am
I don’t know if other writers struggle with this, but sometimes I struggle to write in the ‘showing’ style, rather than the ‘telling’ style. For those of you who don’t know, this is ‘telling’: John and Mary were married in a beautiful ceremony. Gary was John’s best man for the day, and everyone thought Mary looked beautiful. This is showing: As John stood at the end of the aisle, he saw a vision of radiance beginning to move towards him. It was Mary. He had never seen her look so amazing. Gary, his best man, gave him a nudge, but […]
July 16, 2013 at 12:41 pm
It may be a hangover from my journalism days, but I’m no fan of the word ‘very’. No, I don’t think it is a hangover from that. I know other editors who frown on words like ‘very’ as well. While some might have a bugbear about words that end in ‘ly’, ‘very’ is my pet peeve. Admittedly, I still use it sometimes, especially when writing dialogue, because a lot of people use it when they’re talking. However, when I did journalism I was told that if I needed to use the word ‘very’ then the word after it was the […]
July 11, 2013 at 11:12 am
Yesterday I spoke to a writers’ group. It was great fun. There were about eight of them, and we sat around chatting for a couple of hours. Well, if I’m honest, I did most of the talking, but that’s why they asked me to go. I talked about how to get a book published. Because I work for a publisher and am a professional editor, I do have a bit of experience in the kind of things that see new writers knocked back. This group seemed to know a lot about that sort of thing already, but they still had […]
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