Many years ago I took a two-day course on Chicago Manual of Style. It was a great review of high school English classes and I learned much more than I expected. The lesson that stood out to me the most was that grammar and usage is, for the most part, a relative science. There are…
On Writing
A collection of lessons, tools, and techniques on writing.
Neal Stephenson’s Advice for Writers
“I have a pretty simple piece of advice to writers of science fiction or any other kind of literature, which is to just keep writing.” Neal Stephenson Author of Snow Crash and Seveneves While this advice seems to be universal wisdom from successful authors, Stephenson points out two common reasons authors convince themselves to stop…
The One Sentence, One Paragraph, One Page Exercise: What is your book about?
It is surprisingly difficult to be able to explain what a project is really about while you are working on it. If you are not careful, you can write and publish an entire book, get it into bookstores, and even have some readers and still have a difficult time explaining what it is. Worse still,…
Social Media > Search
I’ve built my career as a writer on the power of Google. People search for resources I have created and shared freely online. I’ve mastered the art of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I know how to find out what and how people are searching for something so I can create resources that are useful for…
Write the Ideas You Can’t Get Out of Your Head
When you start to show up every day as a writer, certain ideas pop into your head and stick with you day after day. Sometimes you try to write out these ideas and you are not ready yet. Sometimes you think an idea is one thing but then it morphs into something completely new and…