There is a third Rule of Writing, but it’s more a Rule of Editing: be short.
This is more than brevity being the soul of wit. Short is better than long most of the time. Paper magazines can’t publish three novellas in a row, but they can sometimes squidge things around and fit in … Read more
So I have two Rules of Writing (so far). Be specific, be intentional.
Time to unpack that second one. I’ve broken it into several categories.
Be intentional: Everyone plays favorites.
Everyone has favorite characters and types. For a long time, almost everything I wrote involved a tall, skinny, white, redheaded female outcast. I … Read more
Let’s talk about herbs.
No, let’s talk about some herbs. Not in the basil-mint-dill sense, no. When the woodsman cooks a rabbit, he uses ‘some savory herb’. When your character has a cough, the healer she visits lives in a cottage festooned with ‘some healing herbs’ and gives her ‘some herb’ to help her … Read more
