by Pamela Fernuik |
You have finished writing the first draft of your story, a version of your whole story from beginning to end. Now it is time to edit, to revise your words to make your story clear and compelling, so the reader will continue reading after the first sentence.
Editing your story might feel like an impossible task, but when you have a strategy to use, you can be confident you can edit your own story and improve your writing.
Whatever you do, do not skip the important step of editing your first draft. According to David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, “Revision is all there is.”
by Liz Bureman and Elizabeth Nettleton |
In speech, when you contract “could have,” “would have,” or “should have,” you end up with what sounds like, “could of,” “would of,” and “should of.” However, that is not what should be written. The proper contracted forms of could/would/should have are could’ve/would’ve/should’ve.
And yes, could’ve is an acceptable contraction. What is not acceptable is saying “could of” instead, because that is just plain wrong.
by Kellie McGann |
Writers encounter dialogue every day, but too often recently I’ve seen great stories ruined by choppy, incoherent, and straight up weird dialogue.
Let’s break down the essentials of dialogue tags so we can all write clearer conversations.
by Liz Bureman and Elizabeth Nettleton |
One of my all-time favorite movies is The Usual Suspects. I could watch it on a loop, and I’d still never get sick of it. If you haven’t seen it, I’m going to spoil the ending, and if you keep reading and get mad at me, it’s your own fault because that movie has been around since 1995 and you really should have seen it by now.
The vast majority of the movie is Kevin Spacey’s con man character telling a cop about a job that results in a huge explosion and lots of deaths. He says the mastermind behind the job is a man named Keyser Soze. At the end of the movie, we learn that Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze, and a good number of details from the story that he told the police were made up from things he observed in the cop’s office.
The first thing your brain does after it picks itself up off the floor is get confused: Wait—if he made up those details, what other bits of information did he make up? Was anything he just told us real? Is Keyser Soze even real?
And just like that, the movie that was so straightforward for the first 100 minutes is suddenly a completely different movie.
by Liz Bureman and Elizabeth Nettleton |
While colons can be intimidating at first, they’re lovely, distinguished punctuation marks that are quite easy to use once you get the hang of them. Let’s dig a little deeper into how to use colons correctly.
by Liz Bureman and Joe Bunting |
Today, we’ll look at the difference between polysyndeton vs asyndeton, share some examples, and explain how and when to use them both in your writing. Let’s get started!
