Some General Writing Advice

Mr. Griffen over at the Barley Hut offers excellent writing advice. The last three on the list separates it from the million others out there. Don’t miss the comments, either. There’s lots of meat in there as well.

On the other end of the stick, you have freelance writer John Scalzi and his writing advice. Much of it flies in the face of the feel-good creative writing advice to which you are accustomed. That’s because he’s writing about composing requested pieces for money. Sometimes, writing is about paying the gas company rather than following your muse.

These two offer a good balance between writing for passion and writing for profit. When you have a chance to write whatever you want, grab it and write yourself to pieces. But don’t bemoan an opportunity to write what someone else wants if they pay you to do it. Have a voice and a style, but don’t make that more important than writing to an audience and providing what your client wants.

If you can’t get enough writing advice (or are looking for just one more thing to read before you start writing) try Writing.org, where Durant Imboden has an article—or two—for every occasion. Then close your browser and write, dangit!

Writing Tips and Thoughts

In looking for blogs to include on my Blog Day post tomorrow, I ran across Angela Booth. While I'm not in love with her style, she offers a lot of information for freelance writers. She's got one blog for writing for the Internet, another for freelance writing in general, and more on blogging and copy writing. You have to dig a bit for the meat, but she does hide plenty between the gristly ads.

I quite liked the technique she shared of chatting with yourself to get into your writing. You can use it to explain to yourself what you want an article to accomplish or what to include in your novel's next scene. You'll end up writing part of what you wanted to do anyway – just flesh it out properly!

Then I ran across Laura Spencer. Her post if friends and family are involved in your writing started a train of thought. I blog about writing style and grammar because no one in my off-line life cares about them enough to have lengthy, thoughtful, frequent discussions.

I wonder if that's a frequent motivation for bloggers – that they have an interest that their “real world” contacts don't share their passions. What an excellent reason to write articles and blog about something – because you want to connect with (and educate) others about what you love. There's my feel-good-about-the-Web thought for the week.

Quick Links: Free Toys, Networking, and Finger Shaking

Grammar Now! offers a fun pair of tools when know your question and need a quick answer. The rest of the site appears dedicated to things you have to pay for, but the tool dictionary and grammar term tools are free.

If that's not enough grammatical entertainment for you, try taking a grammar safari. This idea combines excellent language practice with playing on the Internet – what more could you want?

For those of you looking for more information on my position from yesterday, please take a read through the argument presented at owlcroft.com. Its eloquence and logic may persuade you if I failed. As a bonus, the examples give you a few laughs along the way.

If you're looking for a place to network with writers and educators, take a wander though the Association of Writers and Writing Programs's fora for writers. They offer a separate forum each for fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. The “General Chat” forum shows a few calls for submission from a few journals, although they date back several months.

Last, take a peek at Peak Writing's article about what not to do in your introduction. The third point makes the best point: don't use a dictionary definition. If you can't explain your topic without resorting to this tactic then you shouldn't be writing about it in the first place. Demonstrate your grasp of the subject with your writing. Don't rely on stilted and predictable openings like, “The definition of shoehorn at Dictionary.com is...” Readers will leave without bothering to get any further than that.

Dave Pollard and Kevin Muldoon, More Tips

I ran across a link to Dave Pollard’s blog on not just how to blog but how to do it well and how to get better. There are several insanely useful links in this post, so I'll just link to the whole thing. I've got a sneaking suspicion that my readability is not quite where it ought to be, under these guidelines. Then again, maybe I don't want it to be.

Again, I think the readability of your blog is an act of finding balance. I don't want to "dumb it down" to the lowest common denominator, but then again I don't want to alienate folks, either. If someone is looking for tips it isn't really going to help them if I like to stretch my vocabulary muscle rather than remembering that these posts are not solely for my benefit (or entertainment). I ran this post through the readability tool in Microsoft Word and was pleasantly surprised to see that I’m doing better than I thought. I was pretty close to Mr. Pollard’s specified target numbers.

As promised, I did take a peek at Kevin Muldoon’s blog as well. Apparently it’s only been up since March of ’07 but he’s packed a ton of information into it. There was an interesting entry on doing paid reviews on your blogs. It makes some good points about how to do them better and thus how to get paid more. He’s got a pile of information about making money on the web. The only real criticism that I have is that he has a tendency to forget his capital “I” and skip spaces after periods. That’s distracting for a grammar freak like me.