Share on facebook Facebook Share on twitter Twitter We teach our students how to write and get published! View our Course Catalog > Poetry, like any art form, is improved with practice. The more you do it, the better you’ll become at it. But there is something very special about poetry: the more you practice…
Facebook Twitter We teach our students how to write and get published! View our Course Catalog > It’s National Poetry Month, and with the chaos of coronavirus that’s unsettled us and our need to stay as close to home as possible, now, more than ever, is the perfect time to delve into poetry for the…
Narrative nonfiction writers need to describe people, places, objects, and events in imaginative but also accurate ways. Enter imagery. Follow these 3 tips.
Narrative nonfiction is popular with kids, teachers, and publishers. Here are the top three missteps to avoid when writing narrative nonfiction.
The content of your piece is the what of your writing. How you say it is the voice. Time to talk about how to develop your author voice in your work.
Facebook Twitter We teach our students how to write and get published! View our Course Catalog > “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” Those familiar opening lines from Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield are…
IFW Instructor Victoria Sherrow shares how to effectively use quotes from historical figures and experts when writing narrative nonfiction novels and articles.
Facebook Twitter We teach our students how to write and get published! View our Course Catalog > Melissa Stewart, writer and nonfiction evangelist, fills her Twitter feed with books and bits to help writers and buyers better understand nonfiction. She’s made nonfiction her life. And she explains that nonfiction is basically broken into two broad…
Facebook Twitter We teach our students how to write and get published! View our Course Catalog > “Just the facts, ma’am.” These oft-repeated words are associated with Sergeant Joe Friday, a character in the 1950s TV police drama “Dragnet.” Friday’s actual words were “All we want are the facts,” but the point remains: Investigators need…
Facebook Twitter We teach our students how to write and get published! View our Course Catalog > Writing a publishable picture book is hard. It simply is. The competition is incredible. And your book must do so many things well. It needs to sing. It needs to speak to every reader, whether child or adult.…
Verbs play a key role in building effective sentences, so pay close attention to them as you revise and polish. These 7 writing tips will make your story shine!
188: Misunderstood Verbs
February 21, 2020
Share on facebook Facebook Share on twitter Twitter We teach our students how to write and get published! View our Course Catalog > According to Dr. David Dunning, a psychology professor at Cornell, we are not good judges of our own competency. In other words, we aren’t very skilled at telling if we’re good at…
Facebook Twitter We teach our students how to write and get published! View our Course Catalog > “Everything is in the tone.”—Sherwood Anderson For a well-polished manuscript, make sure you use tone and mood effectively. Tone in fiction refers to an author’s attitude toward the characters and events in the story. The tone helps to…
Share on facebook Facebook Share on twitter Twitter We teach our students how to write and get published! View our Course Catalog > Polishing a manuscript involves both big picture corrections, such as plot issues or motivation issues for your characters, and incredibly small, picky bits where you’re really bringing out the shine in each…
Today we focus on ways to intensify a third-person point of view to achieve a close third person viewpoint drawing readers deeply inside a character’s POV.
Share on facebook Facebook Share on twitter Twitter We teach our students how to write and get published! View our Course Catalog > Dialogue serves a number of purposes in a book or story. It brings immediacy since dialogue takes place at a specific moment in time, thus bringing the reader into the story. It…
Facebook Twitter We teach our students how to write and get published! View our Course Catalog > What to do (and not do) in your characters’ conversations As a final check through your dialogue, a good idea is to give a scene to two friends and have them read a different character as if they…
Setting and dialogue must influence each other. Let’s look at one conversation in three different places to see how setting influences the dialogue.
Dialogue is a great way to get readers to care about your characters and eager to find out what happens next. Here are 4 tips for snappy dialogue.
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