How to Improve Your Writing.
Articles that instruct or offer advice in the craft of writing.
IMPROVE YOUR WRITING READY TO EDIT At last! After months of work, I sent my novel-in-progress to my substantive editor. This is the editor who will delve into the overall story, characters, plot, and writing. She’ll point out places where I should dig deeper into my characters and flag scenes with ‘talking heads’ that would …
Humor writing in general is not easy and for the most part, it is not spontaneous. It takes practice and it takes knowing your audience. Because it is subjective, humor writing takes sensitivity. You might decide to do a piece about your Aunt Gertrude suffering with dementia.
What do I need to reach the delicious writing goal? You need a host of fresh characters, imaginative plotting, soupçon of back-story, descriptive settings, minimal but creative description, tension leading up to conflict, theme, subtext, allusion, pacing, climax, resolution, logic, whimsy, surprise, and prose.
As a Canadian writer, I often find myself in a unique position. As a child in a commonwealth nation, I grew up learning the British spellings of words, the metric system, and with the Queen on my coins. But with the USA as a bordering neighbour (neighbor), and most TV and film media coming from the States, their influence on Canada is undeniable.
I write my novels using the Three Act Structure, with aspects of The Hero’s Journey. Since the middle act is twice as long as the others, I treat it as a four-act structure. As I finished Winter’s Rage, it struck me that the first three books in the series echoed the first three acts of each novel.
