Writing Tools
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
How to Get Out of the Slush Pile
Dawn Raffel
Here’s a literary puzzle: Inboxes all over the world are filled to virtually bursting, yet editors and agents frequently lament (in private)...
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
Playing With Status
Judy Sternlight
As an independent developmental editor who specializes in fiction, I help writers to fine-tune their novels. Sometimes a central character needs...
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
How to Start Your Novel
David Gordon
Of course there is no one way. When it comes to writing, my motto is “whatever gets me to the next page,” but page one is often the hardest
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
Dialogue or Conversation?
Jason Starr
I learned a lot about crime fiction writing in an odd place—the theater. While I was completing my MFA in playwriting at Brooklyn College, I...
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
The Hidden Power in Each Perspective
Kathleen Alcott
Perhaps because it’s the narrative mode that most resembles our interior as people, first person narration is the natural impulse of many developing writers
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
Tips for Writing Dialogue
Teddy Wayne
There are three forms dialogue can take: summary (They talked all class about dialogue), indirect speech (And did they enjoy the stories about dialogue?
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
When Logic Met Fiction
Tracy O’Neill
Students of logic and rhetoric will be familiar with the syllogistic formula: major premise, minor premise, conclusion. All wax melts
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
How to Write a Sex Scene
Rebecca Schiff
But what if I’m not filthy enough? you think. What if Bruce Springsteen is busy? Most sex scenes are read and forgotten
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
What a Nude Drawing Class Taught Me About POV in Fiction
Patricia Park
“For years I took the old creative writing adage of ‘show, don’t tell’ to heart. I’d detail every trip my characters took...
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
Notes on Dialogue
Tracy O’Neill
At a certain point in their careers, most fiction writers, in their critiques of dialogue, cease to complain, ‘But no one would really say that!