One of my favorite books is Stephen King’s On Writing, and one of my favorite parts of that book is when he describes the rabbit. Remember that part? After a few sentences, readers pictured a white rabbit with a blue number eight on it. King used the illustration to describe the telepathic nature of reading and…
Yes, the title was intentional. I borrowed it from the department of redundancy department. Telling a story in a concise way should be a goal of the novelist. I say should, because based on the length of some books and what I’ve seen both in published works and in works I’ve critiqued, this isn’t always…
There’s a bit of a misconception out there regarding authors. I know because I had this bright idea before I published that I would write something like “10% of all royalties will be donated to such and such organization” in the front or back matter of my book. Philanthropic, no? Another author told me it’s…
Editing is a vitally important step in the writing process. I don’t know about the rest of you, but my first drafts suuuuuuck. Did you see that episode of Mythbusters where they literally took a piece of shit and polished it to a lovely sheen? That’s the editing process. Though one would hope that the…
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.…
There’s a hashtag going around on Twitter today: #20ThingsIWantFor2015. I thought the presence of “20” was amusing, because who can write about 20 things in 140 characters? Fortunately, I have a blog with unlimited characters. MWHAHAHA! That sounded more maniacal than I planned. Anyway. I’ll count down from 20. Because New Years. Some are serious,…
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…
Allison Maruska 