At the end of January, when I stopped teaching, I thought about the writing I’ve been promising myself to do for many years. The first thing I did was put a couple of previously written, poorly written, novels for sale as ebooks. There’s the Barnes and Noble “nook” and the Amazon Kindle as well as…
Some call it proofreading, some call it editing, and I don’t really care which. Step 4 is easy. Punctuation? Spelling? Grammar? All good? Done. MSWord and spell check are a great help, but things will slip by. This step – for me – is almost unnecessary because I’m making an effort to proofread during the revising…
For me, revising is the worst part of writing. It puts me to sleep, bores me to tears, and leaves a literal pain in my butt and shoulder. However, without it, stories would suck. Revising mainly involves reading, re-reading, and asking questions. “Does that make sense? Will the reader see what I see?” “He said he…
When I write a story, specifically fiction, I’m writing a movie. I assign actors I think could play my characters. A movie plays in my head. The chosen actors play the parts. I watch. I type what I see. That’s all I do. If a scene doesn’t work, I essentially yell “Cut!” and delete/backspace and…
The writing process – step 1: pre-writing. It starts with a thought, an inspiration, an event that makes me say, “What would happen if…?” In the case of this story, which has a working title of The Connection, it began with a tragedy. There was a plane crash last year involving a charter flight that…
in stephen king’s book, On Writing, he said that one of the keys to writing is to find a comfortable place to work. this is my comfortable place. it’s time to start using it. for those of you who wouldn’t know, and for those few of you who might know, i like to write. over the past 10 or…
brainsnorts inc. 