The writing group you started three or six months ago is still going, but there’s something not quite right about it. It’s time to step back and evaluate it: 1. Attendance Are the charter members all still attending? Or, if one or more people have dropped out, was it mutually beneficial for them to do … Read more
The colon is a versatile punctuation mark. Here are its three primary functions, followed by a few other uses: Definition or Expansion “But here’s the interesting thing: He hadn’t ever been there before.” Note the capitalization of the first word after the colon. All usage guides agree that in a sentence like “I want you … Read more
You love to write, and perhaps you’ve even had some of your work published, but you just can’t seem to get your career as a freelance writer of nonfiction off the ground. Here are some flight lessons: 1. Focus Nonfiction is an enormous universe. Map out a very small segment of the cosmos. Do you … Read more
As Glinda the Good Witch says in The Wizard of Oz, “It’s always best to start at the beginning.” That’s where editors and literary agents generally get going, so perhaps you should, too. Here are some strategies, accompanied by exemplars from literature, for making the first line of your novel or short story stand out … Read more
A comma splice is simply a sentence in which a comma is called on to do more than is appropriate for the workaday but weak punctuation mark. When a sentence contains two independent clauses — each of which could essentially stand on its own — separated by a comma (or by nothing at all, in … Read more
Many people confuse these two distinct editorial skills, but it’s important to recognize how they differ, and why. The most obvious distinction is the form the medium takes. Copyediting, once performed by making marks and writing revisions on a typewritten manuscript, is now generally carried out by entering changes in a word-processing program like Microsoft … Read more
You are like unto a god, because you have the omnipotence to create literary characters. But as we all know from watching Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. This is the greatest of yours: Before you endow your creations with any other attributes, they must have motivations. Just as actors need to … Read more