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…
Tag: young writers
Muse on Monday – April 4, 2022
Personally, I love the idea of doors, tunnels, and portals. They lead somewhere else, either to an actual magical other world, like Narnia, or maybe just to a whole new experience. They are a great inspiration for stories since stories are all about moving from one state to another: leaving here and going there, whatever…
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…
Muse on Monday – March 28, 2022
Stories are built on conflict and a lot of the conflict in life is built on either a lack of information or having the wrong information. Arguably, having the wrong information and thinking it is right is worse and so provides more conflict. Think about a love story where a misunderstanding drives the two love…
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…
Muse on Monday – March 21, 2022
Don’t you just love the word “why”? It can be one of the most difficult questions to answer but the answers to it can also drive a story. Sure, we want to see who the murderer is, but also why they did it. If you see a person crying at a table in a restaurant,…
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…
Muse on Monday – March 14, 2022
Writing fiction deals a lot with making connections: connections between the characters, connections between the characters and the setting or with themselves, not to mention connections between the writer and the reader. This is a picture I took near my house and it made me think about all the connections, often invisible, in life and…
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…
Muse on Monday – March 7, 2022
We love stories with heroes. Heroes don’t have to be perfect but they have something in them that we want to see in ourselves, whether it is intelligence, bravery, tenacity, or so forth. That’s why we cheer for them. The best heroes are often unlikely heroes because we can relate to them. Think of Bilbo…
The Green-Walled Treehouse 