First off, if you’ve recently completed a rough draft (via NaNoWriMo or otherwise), congratulations. Really. A big, whooping, stand-up, slow-clap congrats.
Writing a book’s rough draft is a big feat. But then it’s time to get down to business again, because rough drafts are called “rough” for a reason.
Grammar is one of those funny things that everyone needs to know but that not everyone agrees on.
Ah, the dreaded “e” word! Are you ready to learn how to edit your book as well as you possibly can? Hold on tight. This is one of those things that seems so simple, yet can be incredibly difficult to actually accomplish.
I promise it’s worth the effort. If you learn to self-edit, your work will shine like the top of the Chrysler building (i.e. very shiny).
Literary devices can be great tools in your writer’s arsenal to help you illustrate your stories and points in a way that invites engagement and reflection.
And yet what’s the difference between a simile and a metaphor? Metaphor and personification? How much of that English 101 class can you really remember?
You’ve heard over and over again that the most important thing to do as a writer is to write. Write when you don’t want to. Write when you do want to. When you don’t know what to write, write anything.
But there are two sides to the writing coin. There is writing, and there is editing. In this post, I’m going to share a proofreading technique I learned recently that is changing my writing life.
One of the first things I remember from ninth grade English is discussing the origin of comedy and tragedy from the classical Greek plays. We read both Oedipus Rex and Antigone over the course of the next several years of English classes, and Shakespeare’s plays, both comic and tragic, made their way into the curriculum, as they have the tendency to in most high school English classes. I was in a production of As You Like It, one of Shakespeare’s most well-known comedies. Even in those earliest forms of literature and theater, writers played with blending the elements of tragedy and comedy together. We call these blended works tragicomedies or dramedies.
