Anyone who’s spent five minutes in a writing group has heard it: that’s telling. You need to show it. I bet the writers among us are groaning a little. Everyone else is scratching their heads. Let’s start with the basics. Telling occurs when you, well, tell the readers what’s happening. Tim was angry. Showing gives clues…
My book came out last Wednesday, so naturally I’ve been tweeting and fb posting and blogging about it. In the sea of eleventy billion books, mine will easily disappear into the abyss if I let it. Here’s the rub, though: many of the authors of those eleventy billion other books are doing the same thing.…
Earlier this week, someone asked me why I started writing books. They might have meant what do I believe is the greater purpose, what kind of message do I want to send to the world, blah blah blah. The reality is, I started writing books because of a truck. My husband’s truck, specifically. For anyone…
My kids were playing Jenga this afternoon. You remember that game, right? It’s the one where you remove a block from a tower of blocks and add it to the top of the tower. So the tower always has the same number of blocks. Since you’re taking the blocks from the lower parts of the tower…
This post isn’t really about cheese. Though it would be nice to see cheese in my tag cloud. It’s about opinions – more specifically, it’s about others’ opinions about something you produced. Earlier this week, my friend posted a video of a Christmas light display (don’t try to play it; this is a pic of…
I seem to write about problems with writing as they’re occurring. Right now, I’m struggling to fix a section of one of my novels. The section begins right after the middle plot point, or the point that forces the characters into action, which eventually leads to the climax. Here’s the problem: the middle plot point…
Readers choose a story because they think it will hold their interest, so why do they sometimes skim or stop reading the story? There’s probably a variety of reasons, but I’ve noticed a few trends in comments in my critique group and from my own reading habits that may offer some insight. 1. Long, elegant…
I had a pretty unusual day. School was delayed on account of the too-far-below-zero temperatures, and since I work in a school, so was work. I had time to run errands before work, and afterwards I decided to have lunch at a full-service restaurant by myself (note to fellow introverts: do this! It rocks!) and go sweater shopping before…
Last week, I tweeted my blog post about stereotyping characters with the #MondayBlogs hashtag. The user in the pic loved it, retweeted it, and had some questions for me. This is part of the conversation that occurred. I’ve been thinking about the last question ever since. Is defying expectations the key to a good story?…
This will surprise some writers in my critique group, but I’ve been on the fence about writing on this topic. I’m such a POV (point of view, in case anyone’s lost) stickler that this should be a piece of cake. I’ve had writers in the group see my crits and ask me to crit their…
Allison Maruska 