Here to learn? You’re in the WRITE place!

I bumped into writer friend at the library and immediately saw something was wrong with him. He looked ghostly white and on the verge of tears, though he was usually quite stoic.

“What happened?” I asked.

He shook his head, looked away, then whispered, “I just asked her—tell me what you think.”

That’s when I noticed the pages clutched in his hands. His manuscript. It was just a few pages, but they were clearly bleeding red.

After coaxing the story from him, I learned he’d given the first chapter of his first-ever novel to an experienced writer with no instructions. She gave him back a line-by-line edit, listing everything wrong with his story.

He quit writing, which is a shame because he has talent. Although the experienced writer should have had more mercy on this newbie, he should’ve been clearer in his critique needs to avoid miscommunication.

Don’t make the same mistake.

Many of the earliest forms of written literature that exist are religious texts, and most of us at some point in our schooling will study at least one type of ancient mythology, be it Greco-Roman, Egyptian, or Norse. I happened to be fascinated with all three at the age of ten. More than once in these stories do you run into a human mortal being raised to the status of a god. There is a name for this phenomenon, and it’s called apotheosis.

A synopsis is a summary of your manuscript. That’s it. You get a chance to answer the question “what’s your novel about?” in one single-spaced page in an omniscient narrative voice.

Why are some writers five, ten, or twenty times more productive than everyone else? Like superhumans, they somehow juggle the chainsaws of everyday life, yet still manage to consistently finish book after book while others struggle.

For a cat there are many dangerous things to be careful of. We are small and a car might not see us when we try to cross the road; we could be run over and killed. In our homes the humans who live with us might drop a piece of peanut butter toast on our head, and we could smell like peanuts. However, there is something more sinister than fast cars and peanut butter toast.

There is a danger that applies to writers, cats, and humans. The Danger Of Comparing Yourself.

Good writers can express themselves thoughts. But with so much flowing through the chambers of the mind, it is not easy to concisely find just the right words to express and idea or emotion, or to narrate action.

What phrases convey to the reader exactly what the writer is thinking? How do you express yourself while keeping your reader following a logical description, dialogue or argument?