Note: No-Draft Theater is an exercise in improvisational fiction. I intend to write short pieces of fiction only one-to-three posts long, no outlining or other preparation, with each post around a thousand words. These pieces of fiction will only go through the most cursory editing.
Here is your one-stop creative writing site. I get a lot of advice on how to craft my prose from here.
Continue reading “The Weekend Redirect: The Purdue Online Writing Lab”
Arg! Right in the word counts!
I’ve had to delay some of my editing/writing since for the next two months I’ll be in the middle of a move that takes me halfway across the country to points unknown. Well, they’re actually very well established, but why let an ugly fact ruin a turn of phrase?
There are many rules about writing prose fiction. Any creative writing course will drill those rules into you. But don’t be fooled. These “rules” are merely guidelines that help you focus your prose. But they aren’t commandments. I think there is only one real rule so far as prose construction goes:
Rules about writing should be followed, unless they shouldn’t.
Continue reading “The Worst Good Writing Advice I’ve Received So Far”
In the latest post on LionAroundWriting, the subject of “writer’s freeze” is addressed.
Specifically, this refers to a total writer shutdown when panicking about word counts and trying to keep your subject as brief as possible without cutting everything interesting out of a story.
This is more than a post; this is a conversation. So please join in the talk!
…ANYONE ELSE GET THIS? Maybe this terror of going over a word limit began at university with 2000 word limits on essays. I get the freeze when I’m writing a short story. Maybe freeze isn’t a great word for it but I’ll explain. Sometimes I will be writing a piece and I’m so conscious of word count that I end up writing lazy sentences, freezing up; instead of describing the world and filling in those all important details that bring a story to life, I’ll write stubby sentences, providing a skeleton but little else as a result of being way too mindful of the number of words. It’s some form of mental block.
And if I plan to write for a WordPress post, I’m always trying to keep it snappy, under about 5-600 words, and the freeze begins again. I’m so habituated to strive for 500 words online…
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The BIGGEST minutiae 