Good Wednesday morning, everyone. It’s June 1st and I’m wondering where the first half of the year went. Has it flown by for everyone, or is it just me? Before you know it, we’ll be talking back-to-school and seeing Christmas ads.
Before we get that far, here are links for Thursday’s tweets on my @DancingOnCoals account.
“Notoriously, comedy is one of the most difficult forms of writing. This isn’t because it’s so hard to write a gag or a line that’s funny. Life’s a pretty hilarious place, after all. No, it’s difficult because translating goofiness into meaning is vastly more difficult.” So begins t K.M. Weiland’s article: 4 Ways to Write Meaningful Comedy on Helping Writers Become Authors.
“Free stuff. Everyone wants free stuff, right? Or at least discounted stuff. We want the best deal we can get, we shop around and we clip coupons. I admit that I check groupon quite often to see what deals they have going on. But sometimes I wonder what that mentality is doing to us as readers and to publishing” Read more of Terri Bischoff’s thoughts on free stuff in her post: Free Stuff Ramblings on Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room,
What do you do when a reader tells you there’s something wrong with your book? Check out the advice in: Writing: How to Respond When a Reader Claims There’s an Error in Your Book on Self-Publishing Advice Center,
Creating strong, believable characters is always a challenge. Paranormal author Jami Gold offers some advice in: How to Strengthen Our Characters with Strong Writing on her blog.
There’s so much advice bouncing around out there about what an author must do these days, I found this Publisher’s Weekly article by Jane Friedman particularly interesting. Fast, Cheap, and Good: What Publishing Compromises Are You Making?
And finally, a question for all creatives: Are You Ignoring Your Best Ideas? from The Writing Cooperative.
I was thinking a lot yesterday about emotion in fiction. When I first started writing, I was advised to always use strong, active verbs to convey emotion, and so I did–or at least I tried. Years later, as I go back through the original versions of my early works, I’m a bit…embarrassed by how purple the prose is because of some of those strong, active verbs. I’ve come to the realization that sometimes less is more, and while there is no default emotion we can expect all readers to experience when they read a page of our prose, and we do have to be sure to specify what the characters are feeling, sometimes it’s okay for a character to simply feel embarrassed rather than to burn with it, to feel desire rather than to be bowled over by it, and to experience a pang without having it zing all the way up his spine. Learning to get the emotion strong enough without going overboard is a delicate balancing act.
Now go write something!
Dancing on Coals 