Hemingway, like all experienced writers, showed a willingness to sacrifice each fresh layer of words in order to stay true to his overarching story.
Give yourself some distance
Don’t confuse taking time away from a project with slacking off or quitting. A little distance may give you a new vantage point from which to look again. The word revise comes from the Latin revisere, “to look at again.”
Tell your story aloud
Share your story over coffee (or on the phone) with a friend or acquaintance. If you can, record yourself doing so, using free conference calling or pairing Skype with Audio Hijack or another program. Then listen back.
This is a nice list of writing articles from the past year. It has a good number of sources I recognize and just as many new ones. It certainly looks worth the time to explore. Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts on any one of them.
It’s not as violent as it sounds, but this process can prove painful for many writers; it’s all about getting rid of self-indulgent, flowery writing
don’t go off the deep end with the thesaurus. Don’t choose every synonym Word suggests for your replacements, as some lead to awkward phrasing and don’t fit within the context. Your words should fit naturally in the sentence while also decreasing redundancy.
Look for words and phrases like “a number of,” “in order to,” and especially “that.” All can be replaced with shorter and more powerful words or can be completely cut out.
go over your work as if you were an editor. Take a red pen to your words, and cut out anything the content can do without.
it should never be the first thing on your mind while writing.
Don’t be too hard on yourself if you can’t get rid of all forms of “to be,” but make sure there is no other way to phrase the sentence before you give up.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle
Not only did his book confirm for me that the best way to create a positive change is through small acts repeated daily, but the book was exceptionally well written and researched — impressive in that the author is not a professional writer — and so applicable to the many writers I meet who struggle with getting query letters out the door or writing big projects like books and novels.
There are two kinds of motivation. The first type is having a reason for doing something. My motivation for exercise is to look and feel healthy. My motivation for doing this interview is that you asked me to do it and I want to spread the word about mini habits. Unlike the next definition of motivation, your reason for doing things is generally very stable and changes very little over time.
There’s also emotional motivation, which is rooted in enthusiasm and determines your willingness to take action in the moment (“This year I’m going to get in shape so I’m off to the gym!”). Most goal systems rely on this type of motivation; they’ll tell you that you need to find this motivation to succeed. The problem is that emotional motivation isn’t reliable or habit friendly.
There’s a quote from Sun Tzu’s Art of War which sums up the Mini Habit system: “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” By taking one small action a day—just one small behavior change—we start with a win. After that point, you’re free to do more.
The Chicago Manual of Style prescribes spelling out United States as a noun in running text and reserving US for the adjective form only. CMOS also prefers US without periods, to match the US postal codes like AR, MI, and WY.
The AP Stylebook recognizes U. S. as a noun as well as an adjective. It calls for periods when the U.S. appears in a running text, but US without periods in a headline.
When it comes to formal speaking and written text, however, reserve the abbreviation for adjectival use and write out United States as the noun.
in this age of the “writer as an entrepreneur” responsible for a growing share of the work required to not only create but also sell a book, adding management skills to our repertoire of abilities is not at all a bad idea.
as launch time approaches, authors get overwhelmed by thinking that they have to do “everything:” Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, ad campaigns, bookstore talks, conference panels, media articles, email newsletters, book clubs…you name it.
Based on our mission and our definition of success, we can then work out a manageable set of steps to take in line with our specific interests and goals. We feel more in control and less anxious about having to “do it all.”
A more viable definition of success does have a quantitative element, but it doesn’t necessarily mean “number of copies sold or dollars earned.” It can mean other measurable outcomes such as landing a teaching job or a column in a respected publication.
Take that advice beyond the beginning stages, though, and what you get are stories that really should move the reader but don’t, either because the emotions are all related from the outside or because the narrative doesn’t provide the sort of dense, information-rich substrata upon which complex characters are built.
Which leads me to my second point: Your story is about Gina, at forty, deciding whether or not to leave her boyfriend. Are you really going to spend half your story showing us Gina’s white-trash childhood in Elbridge, Michigan (a key bit of backstory)? Or are you just going to cut to the chase, provide a few key details, and move on?
But push this advice too far, and again, you’ll get stuck writing mediocre fiction. Because sometimes the things that don’t work are actually important. They don’t work not because they’re the wrong things, but because they’re the hard, ambitious, at-the-very-edge-of-what-you-even-know-how-to-say-things, and the only way to land them is to dig deeper, work harder, and sometimes even (god help you) add rather than cut.
Robin described the “character flaw” as the belief, need, or fear that shapes a character. It is the barrier that keeps him from moving forward. It determines how he makes decisions, and, for better or for worse, is the essence of who he is. Examples of character flaws are the “belief that love is conditional” and the “fear of failure.”
a character’s “flaw” is the source of both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.
“Do you HAVE to do what you are doing right now?” I can almost always answer “no.” And the answer to the follow-up question, “Do you WANT to be doing what you’re doing right now?” is almost always yes.
The content on your website doesn’t need to appeal to a broad audience like print media does. It also doesn’t need to be on a broad topic. Quite the opposite, actually. Your website and social media content will be quite specific. And what’s more, unlike print media if you do make a mistake it only takes moments to correct. What’s not to love about that?
web content is also more conversational. Content is written to feel personal – as if you’re speaking directly to your audience
Unless you reel in your readers instantly, your well-crafted content goes largely unnoticed and going viral becomes impossible.
Set aside at least 15 to 30 minutes for choosing a magnetic title after crafting your post.
List three to five intriguing titles guaranteed to increase your CTR and page views. After carefully thinking through each option, select the one that inspires you like no other. Ask your friends or followers for feedback.
Actionable verbs can be visualized and acted upon easily.