There are two parts to the writing experience: the reader and the writer. If it is something like a diary that you are not going to show anyone, then you are both the reader and the writer. But there are always both. The people who you would like to read your story are your audience….
Tag: Writing Corner
Writing Corner: The Period
The period, meaning the dot at the end of a sentence, is a pretty straightforward piece of punctuation. After all, it just comes at the end of a sentence, right? This is true, although it can be used a little differently sometimes in fiction writing. At the End of a Sentence There are five ways…
Writing Corner: Exposition
Stories don’t happen in a vacuum. Conflict might be the seed of a story, but the story has to planted somewhere and be about something. We want to make sure the reader understands the ideas in the story. This is where we have to guess what they already know. We might assume the reader could…
Writing Corner: Swearing
Today I’m going to talk about using swearing in your writing. Swearing as an idea is not very well defined but I am going to use it to mean any words that are crude, religiously profane, graphic, or sexual. Books are not usually rated, but movies are so we can think of swearing as anything…
Writing Corner: Framing Devices
Normally when we read a story, the narrator is simply telling us the story, whether it is a narrator outside the story (3rd person) or a character in the story (1st person). This is a one-level story. However, sometimes, just like a frame around a picture, one story can be wrapped around another. This is…
Writing Corner: Custom Adjectives
One cool thing about English is that we make words out of everything (an example of this is the verb to word, which means to make a word out of anything). One way we do this is to make adjectives out of people’s names. We usually use last names since they are more distinctive. Here…
Writing Corner: The Dinkus
This is post about something you have probably seen many times in books but don’t know the name of (at least I didn’t know it until recently.) A dinkus is a break in the writing and is usually made with three stars, like this: * * * How to Use a Dinkus A dinkus is…
Writing Corner: Editing
There is a lot you could say about editing, but I’m not going to try to say it all here. In general, editing is the process of making a piece of writing better. It’s a bit like if you have a rough diamond you just dug out of the ground. If you want to sell…
Writing Corner: Writing Programs
There are many ways to write, including with a pen and paper, or by carving words into a stone wall. However, I’m guessing that when you write, you probably usually use a computer. And on a computer, there is no end to different applications you can use to write. I’m going to look at three…
Writing Corner: The Public Domain
What is the Public Domain? When someone publishes a story, they usually keep the copyright to that story. That means that they are the only one who can sell that story or write other stories with the same characters or setting. For example, as much as you might want to, you cannot publish a story…
The Green-Walled Treehouse 