Articles—So Tiny Yet So Important

Sometimes It's the Little Things That Matter Most


"I'm a writer and editor."

Unless you write it as "I'm a writer and an editor," you are neither.

A painting of a man in a boat who's successfully made it to a calm spot between two tidal waves but whose boat is now being bit in two by a giant shark.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Brief Aside (the '19' Ate My Bray-EEN!) to Avoid Writing a More Difficult Post

Image
Being Famous Won't Always Save You from the Reaper Those who know me well know that I don't shy away from criticism. I mean criticizing others; what sort of masochist welcomes criticism from others? 😉 Certainly not me, or so I've heard before blocking such critics before they unfairly drip their bloody tears upon the fabric of my extraordinary life. OK, where was I? Right. Criticism. The bigger the fish, the bigger the fire   fry  Frey. In this case, James Frey. I dislike James Frey's writing so much that I actually contemplated intentionally misspelling his name just to make it harder to find him. But that's like trying to keep a coke addict from finding a dealer—ain't gonna happen. But I'll be damned if I'm going to supply a link to that freak; a music video is better: And on and on. But truly, Frey is small fry. Let's go bigger—a sacred cow, as it were—the only difference being that I'm fairly certain that a blind, syphiliti
Read more

Character Descriptions That Matter

How much detail to give a character's description is often hotly debated, with two primary schools of thought: 1. Include as much detail as possible about each character in order to let the reader know what the character looks like and also to provide additional imagery. It's good to include all five senses in your descriptions. 2. Only include what is absolutely necessary in order to move the story forward. Assume readers will fill in other details with their own imaginations. Descriptions should be built into the story and not just a date dump - e.g., a whole narrative paragraph describing a character but with no context. Bestselling author Barry Eisler is a great technical writer, but he sometimes uses a little more description than I like (completely a personal preference; to most people, his writing probably seems pretty streamlined). The following are some search results for the word 'hair' in his book Detachment in which that is definitely not the
Read more

Gettin' Laid While Lyin' Around

Image
Lies are what you tell so you can lay someone on the side. But more to the point, lay is transitive (i.e., it takes an object), whereas lie is not. This is further complicated because some idiot decided the past tense of lie should be lay, which also happens to be a present-tense verb. But back to how to know what to write. If you can lay something , it's lay: lay the book down, lay some bricks, lay your best friend's girlfriend. This use of lay is known as a transitive verb. It  transitions based on its meaning when combined with the object it affects. Even Ratt knew this, of course: With lie, there's no object: I'm going to lie down now, don't just lie there, he was lying on the bed. But note that in past tense, lie becomes lay: I lay there all day, NOT I laid there all day, BUT I laid (past tense of lay) the book down. In this usage, lie  and lay are called intransitive verbs—they don't have objects, so they don't change. Ex
Read more