Category: JBIGGARBLOG

Today my mind is on editing again, because I’m still editing my second edition of the Herezoth trilogy. And as much as some days I REALLY feel the itch to be writing again and feel that the autumn can’t get here fast enough, editing is cool, even if it’s tough. It’s worth doing, and it’s worth doing well.

It’s not all fun and games, but here are five reasons to persevere when editing makes you want to pull your hair out:

1. YOU HAVE YOUR STORY.

The most enjoyable, but in a lot of ways, the most challenging part of writing is discovering your story. If you’re editing, that’s DONE. You might cut some things. You might rearrange some things. But generally, once you’ve gotten your draft down and you move on to editing, your basic story is in place.

How reassuring is that? It’s a great relief. In a…

I sometimes wonder just how much responsibility to the world at large us writers have. I did a post recently concerning triggers and got much interesting feedback about that. A trigger can be anything, a taste, a touch, a scent, words read in a book. The general consensus seemed to be that it was the readers’ responsibility to watch for those things that might trigger an untoward response or memory.

As writers, we should write about whatever we want to. There should be no censorship. To rate books like movies seems ridiculous; G, PG, R, X. And who, or what organization, would govern that?

I recall a friend bringing a paperback book to junior high school.  It was Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”. There was a passage in that book where she describes her own breast development and compares them to apricots and cantaloupes. We sat in the library and…

In our last post on writing tips, we gave general advice on how to write good dialogue. Today, we want to blog about so-called dialogue tags.

A dialogue tag is a verb such as “said” or “asked.” The function of a dialogue tag is to let the reader know who’s speaking. If used correctly, dialogue tags are a good thing because they avoid confusion, so here’s some advice on how to use dialogue tags:

1) Avoid “creative” dialogue tags

Some writers become overly creative when it comes to dialogue tags. They seem to think that “said” is boring, so they use a plethora of tags such as whined, admitted, yelled, grumbled, etc. Please don’t do that.

“Said” and “asked” (and the occasional “shouted” or “whispered”) are actually the best verbs to use in a dialogue tag. Readers’ minds skip over it, while other tags pull the readers’ attention away from the dialogue and become a…

From CBS.com

by Margie Lawson, @MargieLawson

If you watch NCIS, you know Jethro Gibbs, aka Mark Harmon, has rules. Fifty-plus rules. My next fifteen (or fifty) blogs will feature a different Margie-Rule for writers.

[Click here for Margie’s Rule #1:
Never Take Any Word for Granted.]

Margie’s Rule #2: Write the Hard Stuff: Facial Expressions

Write the hard stuff.

Those words sound harsh. Nobody wants to write the hard stuff. And writing fresh facial expressions is tough.

It’s easy to write a sigh. It’s easy to write a nod. It’s easy to have a character shake their head.

It’s easy to write eyebrows raising, lifting, lowering, wagging.

It’s easy to write eyes narrowing, widening, slitting, squinting, winking, rolling.

It’s not easy to write fresh facial expressions.

You may be thinking, why write fresh? What’s wrong with writing overused facial expressions? Everybody writes them.

Lots of writers use…

the past meets the present

Continuing my series of posts about time and fiction, I couldn’t avoid taking up a topic I’ve explored before: the flashback. When it comes to dealing with time in our stories, I think there are two majors things we have to consider, and this is just as true for flashbacks as it is for any other time-related issue:

1. Keeping the mechanics of time correct (years, seasons, hours, etc. We don’t want someone aging a decade in three years or winter becoming summer.)
2. Portraying the passage of time in a way that emphasizes things we consider important and suits our aims better than other ones could have chosen.

Part of number two, where flashbacks is concerned, is how you transition into them. Here are two methods to transition into flashbacks that, though common, might prove useful:

THE TRIGGER

Flashbacks are sometimes looked down upon as cheap…