|
I am stealing this post idea directly from Sierra Godfrey, who says other bloggers have written similar posts, so I guess I’m not the only one stealing post ideas.
BOOKS
Chicago Manual of Style, Sixteenth Edition
Although Sierra already mentioned this one, I’d be a bad editor if I didn’t suggest the […]
If you studied English in college, you probably read Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room Of One’s Own in which she states: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” I won’t go into the figurative and feminist meanings of the text, and I’m opening this question […]
I bet you had no idea the em-dash was endangered, did you? Well, when Julia Scheeres commented on my post about semicolons that she loves to use em-dashes as well, I remembered having read a tweet that said the em-dash had gone out of vogue with flared jeans and peasant shirts. I was shocked. So […]
A quick note about semicolons. I’ve blogged about them before: how to use them to connect two independent clauses and alternatives you can use instead: a period and a capital or a comma and a coordinating conjunction, or FANBOYS. But what I didn’t say was use them sparingly. It’s tempting when you learn a new […]
If you’ve been writing for a while, you’ve probably heard the expression, “Kill your darlings.” (The real expression is “Murder your darlings” and comes from Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch’s “On The Art of Writing”: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscripts […]
When editing and critiquing submissions, the academic in me wants to copyedit every sentence until it’s grammatically and typographically perfect. That means, if I’m following the Chicago Manual of Style, I may want to add a comma before “and” in a series: “I love ice cream, cake, and pies.” Or I may want to make […]
I’m continually amazed by stories like Tawna Fenske’s who “In the last eight years [has] written nine full manuscripts and six partials.” Whoa! In the last eight years I have written exactly ONE memoir and revised the hell out of it and still haven’t finished it. Sure, I earned an MFA, got married, and had […]
Many people think they never get writer’s block. They see writer’s block as this weird disease that only people like Hemingway got once they had published ten books and had run out of things to say. But almost every writer I know has days when she sits down at her computer and doesn’t want to […]
Links!
The Wall Street Journal has a great article about vanity press going digital.
Meg Waite Clayton has a great series of posts on how writers get started. Start with Part I and read all six!
After the New Yorker released its 20 Under 40 list (I’m honored to know three of them—Daniel Alarcón, Yiyun […]
A hallmark of literary fiction and memoir that distinguishes them from genre fiction is figurative language. While genre fiction (mystery, sci-fi, chick lit, fantasy) focuses mostly on plot and narrative, literary fiction focuses more on character and style, and style is often achieved through the use of fancypants language like metaphors and similes. I am […]
|
|