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: serried…. My husband is reading the 1950 book Escape to Adventure, by Fitzroy Maclean. Not quite my cup of tea, the 419-page book is subtitled: The adventure-autobiography of […]
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Reading time: About 3 minutes Do you understand the difference between self-doubt and idea doubt? It’s a really important distinction for most writers… I first heard about what’s called “the progression of creativity,” from my son, Duncan. It goes like this: This is awesome This is tricky This is crap I am crap This might be
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Reading time: Less than 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 BBC blog post describing how commas save lives… I have a copy editor who saves me from grammatical embarrassment when
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Viewing time: 5 mins 35 secs 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 #20, addressing how to deal with beta readers. The post first ran on June 9/17. Transcript: Welcome to The
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Reading time: Less than 2 minutes I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of metaphors and similes from Jonathan Franzen…. I’ve never been a huge fan of Jonathan Franzen. I found his 2001 novel — a satirical family drama — The Corrections,
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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: daedal…. You might know Daedalus as the prisoner who fashioned wings of feathers and wax to escape from the island of Crete with his son Icarus. (He’s
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Reading time: About 4 minutes If you have difficulty writing, consider using the tool of CBT — Cognitive Behavioural Therapy — to help give yourself a boost. It’s easy and inexpensive and you can do it yourself… Are you familiar with CBT? If you’re not, I apologize for using the jargon-y abbreviation but it stands
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Reading time: Less than 2 minutes 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 on the negative effects of screen reading… I love my Kindle. I like the way it can hold
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Viewing time: 3 minutes 43 seconds 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 #19, addressing how to be a good interview subject. The post first ran on June 2/17. Transcript Welcome to
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about the figurative language (and other writing skills) of novelist Julian Barnes… As a longtime fan of the superb British writer Julian Barnes, I was thrilled to receive a gift of his
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