Editing - Story Tips - Publishing

Engage Your Reader with Active Voice in Your Writing While it has it’s uses – mostly in business writing – passive voice is considered weak and unappealing. Technically speaking, voice is determined by the property of a transitive verb which shows whether the subject of a sentence acts or is acted upon. Lets look at...

How Cliché is Using Clichés in Your Writing? This one’s a tough nut to crack. Avoiding cliches is like avoiding headaches. We’d all love to, but there’s no way we’ll ever completely avoid them. With hundreds of cliches, they’re as thick as pea soup, and therefore, often the first ideas which come to mind. Clichés...

You’ve Written “The End” – But Is Your Book Ready? Okay, so you’ve finally reached the magic words, The End. But is it really? Are you done? Have you really finished your book? Chances are, you haven’t. If you’ve only written the words The End, once or twice – if you’ve spent very little time...

How to Avoid & Crush Writer’s Block Silencing the Inner Critic – Overcoming writer’s block sometimes involves shutting up the little green monster that sits on the writer’s shoulder (particularly the beginning writer) telling them that everything they write is stupid, and that they’ll never make it as a writer. Find a way to build...

What is an Adverb?  An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. Here’s some examples: Adjective Form: happy clear close dear perfect Adverb Form: happily clearly closely dearly perfectly Of course, not all adverbs in in ly as the following list demonstrates: quite very much right too never  soon...

What Words Serve as Both Adjectives & Adverbs? Yes, some words can serve as both adjectives and adverbs. He swung hard with a right hook. Here, hard serves as an adverb which modifies the verb swung. When he fell, his head hit the hard concrete. Here, hard is an adjective modifying the noun concrete. Occasionally,...

Are You Overwhelming Your Readers? Have you ever run across a prologue like this: (usually in sci-fi books) Captain Briggs took the helm and began shouting orders. “Ensign, optimize the traspositional filtration valves to ignite the gravitational destabilizers.” “I can’t do that,” Ensign Scott replied. “If I optimize the filtration valve, the axomital diffusionators will...

How Many Manuscript Drafts Should You Go Through? When working on a book of any kind, if you haven’t gone through a minimum of three drafts, you probably don’t have a finished product. The first draft should be seen only as an opportunity to articulate and develop ideas in a rough form. This tells you...