Reading time: About 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes and metaphors from Emma Donoghue… Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an […]
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Reading time: Less than one minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: fubsy…. I was reading the Delia Owens’ novel Where the Crawdads Sing when the word fubsy jumped off the page and gave
What does ‘fubsy’ mean? Read More »
Reading time: About 4 minutes Is distraction free writing something that eludes you? Read on to learn about five practical tips for achieving it… Here is a scary number: The average person is distracted every 40 seconds when working at their computer.Isn’t that mind-boggling? We can’t work for even a literal minute without being
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Reading time: About 1 minute This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post about how to restart a stalled book… Is your writing project: sitting in the
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Viewing time: 4 min. 40 sec. The Write Question is a weekly video podcast about writing that I started in 2017 and that ran, more or less weekly, until April 2022. This is a republication of issue #56, with advice on how to capture your family history. The post first
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Reading time: About 2 minutes I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of telling images from Joanna Quinn… The English writer Joanna Quinn is marvellously imaginative. Although The Whalebone Theatre is her first novel, she writes with
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: fumarole…. I live on the Pacific West Coast, in an earthquake zone. Perhaps that’s why I’m familiar with seismological terms — and
What’s a ‘fumarole’? Read More »
Reading time: Just over 1 minute Most of us would like to be faster writers. But how do we get there? Today I address the question: How long does it take to write 1000 words… Do you know how long it takes to write 1,000 words? Or do you know
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Reading time: About one minute This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I explore the question: why write fiction? Do you have romantic ideas about the life of being a fiction
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Viewing time: 4 min. 58 sec. The Write Question is a weekly video podcast about writing that I started in 2017 and that ran, more or less weekly, until April 2022. This is a republication of issue #55, with advice on hiring editors. The post first ran on May 4/18.
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