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5 Ways to Improve the Action in Your Story

Check out my guest post on improving the action in your story over at Anne. R. Allen’s blog today, then buy your own copy of Writing Action!

Lit Starts—The Writers Grotto’s New Series of Books About Writing

News Flash!

We at the Writers Grotto are so excited to announce the launch of a new series of books for writers—LIT STARTS. The first four books in the series (Writing Humor, Writing Dialogue, Writing Character, and Writing Action) will be in bookstores this coming Tuesday, September 10. Each book features an essay […]

Common Writing Mistakes to Avoid

First, I want to announce that the winner of the BlogHer ’13 swag and copy of Guy Kawasaki’s ebook APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, is …

ANNE ALLEN!

Congratulations, Anne! Please email me your mailing address so I can send you your swag!

Now I want to talk a little about craft and […]

How to Write Kick-Ass Character Descriptions

I’m guilty of it, too: The description of a new character who has just entered your story as having “big brown eyes and frizzy black hair” or “ginger hair that cascaded down her shoulders and eyes the color of jade.” No matter how creative you get, describing a person according to his or her hair […]

Five Ways to Murder Your Loved Ones

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 […]

Contest Winner and Link Love

The winner of this month’s Writerland contest is …

KRISTAN!

Kristan, e-mail me your address and to whom you’d like the book addressed (Kristan, Kristan the Magnificent, etc.) to meghan (at) meghanward (dot) com. Then, whenever you’re ready, send me 20 pages of your manuscript or a short story, and I will critique it and […]

Memoir Monday

I’m going to start blogging about the process of memoir writing, a process I have become all too familiar with these past – eh hem – “couple” of years. This week, I’ll talk about tense.

It’s a difficult decision whether to write your memoir in past or present tense. I wrote mine in past and […]

The Editing Hour: Commonly Misused Words

Last Monday’s post on “that” vs. “which” and “I” vs. “me” led to some interesting comments about other words people often confuse. Here is the list with a few more added. They’re in no particular order.

1. Irregardless—this is not a word! It’s regardless, regardless of how much emphasis you want to put on it.

[…]

KFKD—The Editor in Your Ear

After gathering this list of craft books from my writing friends, I decided to revisit some of my favorites to see which bits of advice have had the greatest impact on my writing habits.

This passage from Annie Lamott’s Bird by […]

The Editing Hour: Usage and Punctuation

I am reluctant to get too much into copyediting because I am a stickler for grammatical and other errors, and I hate to get too caught up in that and lose sight of the more important things in a story like plot, dialogue, characters, etc. But here we go. A lot of common mistakes I […]