Glib is fluent. Glib is hip. It is superficial. It is shallow. It is insincere. But it is fluent and hip. The words just roll off the tongue. They can roll off a writer’s manscript as well. The writer is not necessarily insincere as a person, but is writing about a subject in a glib… Read More Glib is a way of writing
There seemed to be no unifying idea, but I’m feeling better about how I wrote some of those that are now published. They work. Even the rejected stuff – said the writer.
If you’ve read the first drafts of Star Wars you may understand or at least I do as I have just compared the older stories of Star Wars with the finished script. It was amazing. I was so surprised to see the dearth in the original drafts compared to the later ones. That is, I… Read More Multiple drafts reveal a real development
Yesterday’s writings can become today’s better pieces, can be rearranged into other pieces, can be retained for their use at a later stage. Yesterday is good.
Improve! Speak for yourself, someone says! Yes, I aim to, maybe you will, too. We’re all trying…Take the opportunity to improve your work by looking at your old articles, stories, and seeing if anything could do with a tweak or major revision. Any things you learn in your revising will spill into your current work… Read More Self-improvement for the writer
Whatever you do do it well- Walt Disney I’d like to avoid the difficult editing stages of polishing a piece of writing, so I may delay doing it, even so ending up having to do it, because I just gotta. It is thinking about what I want out of the piece that motivates me to… Read More Editing to personal satisfaction
They tell you to never look back. It just stifles the present. In writing, it makes one think of the negative points of one’s writing. I wish I had done it better one moans. However, I do not mind looking back at what I have written in the past if just for the curiosity of… Read More Introspective writer’s moments
Do small touches make the difference to an article? Like a slight tweak, a slight delete, a shortening, a change of word? Emphatically, yes! But it depends. Sometimes, it wouldn’t matter, but other times, it may sort out the clutter and expression, say, into something more readable, exciting, or colorful.
Ever thought an article of yours that was published sounded uneven? Like some parts could have been better, but other parts were good. But in the end it sort of comes out in the wash and the effect of the article actually says something well. That’s a bit of a strange working, if I may… Read More Editing SOS
It’s a problem that I have been overcoming. With some of my work, a problem when I’m writing is saying so much that some paragraphs become cluttered or not saying enough when a thought should be expanded so as to provide the meaning. But I had to be more thoughtful about these difficulties. I somehow… Read More Thoughtfully approaching a piece if it’s cluttered
This week I’ve been turning paragraphs around in terms of their arrangement within the paragraph. But what about swapping two paragraphs around, so that the bottom paragraph goes at the top and the top paragraph goes to the bottom. As there are only two paragraphs in this piece this wasn’t a case of plowing through… Read More Fancy editing
A few years ago I got a call saying they wanted a clarification on something I wrote. Of course, one could take this personally–thoughts going through your head, ‘I got it wrong’, ‘I did bad’ etc. But it reminded me to be sure of the details in seemingly clear-cut places.
Editors are there to present your work, but I wasn’t expecting life lessons as well. However, I’ve finally grasped what they were on about. And it’s all true. There were two lessons, both points resonating now.
Once this week I thought: I’m still ruthlessly deciding on what devotional ideas to use or not to use. If any are worth writing up formally, so I can relax by writing less. But the material’s mostly gone –been rubbished, binned and formally incinerated. Remnants, though, survive. Even those I thought I could recycle in… Read More Binning one’s work may be premature
Writers on their own, with a book in hand, may need an agent or representative, because agents are closer to the publishers. Agents are also good because they save the writer having to concentrate on marketing work as well as writing it. One can go it alone in the grand scheme of choices a writer… Read More Marketing one’s work alone
Storyteller's Eclectic Flying Machine 