Writing

I know the advice. I understand the advice. I even give writing advice. And then I happily break things when I think I have a better idea. That’s the great thing about advice. It’s not a set of rules you can’t break, but a collection of options, opinions, and suggestions you can choose to use.…

You might have read that starting sentences with the same word is a writing fault. That’s mostly very good advice. Except when it isn’t. Starting several sentences in a row with the same word isn’t automatically wrong. Very often, it’s unintentional or perhaps a sign that your writing needs more variety. However, sometimes repetition is…

When you start a sentence with a description, it’s a quick and easy way to make your writing much more interesting from the very first word. You don’t need to go to extremes because it usually takes only a handful of words to do the job well. Sometimes you already have a description appearing later…

The easiest way to avoid using “it’s important” so often in your writing is to delete it and simply say what is important. It might sound like a trite fix, but the phrase can sometimes sound like an instruction or, at least, a strong recommendation. A lot of the time, it’s just an empty fluff…

If you’re writing fiction, telling adjectives are an easy form of telling to overlook. It’s easy to skip past them because they’re such a quick way to move a story forward. However, speed is not always the best option. Very often, using a simple adjective is a missed opportunity to show a reader what’s happening,…

The reason I keep writing is because that’s what I’ve done since I was around fifteen. At first, it was poems and short stories, then song lyrics, and later, with the internet, blog posts and books. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t write, but I’ve never made it a daily ritual. However, most…

When you write like you speak, it’s much easier to develop your unique writing voice. But don’t take this too literally because when speaking, we repeat ourselves, use filler words and sounds, hesitate, utter unfinished sentences, and change direction without thinking. Good writing is rarely exactly like our natural speech patterns. But when you construct…

Many writing apps need an internet connection to work. But offline writing apps give you much more freedom and choice about where, when, and how you write. While it’s almost natural now to be online, having the option to write offline means you can take your work to a cafe, a park, or a river…

Every writer uses empty sentence starters, often without even noticing. The reason they are so common is that they are easy to use. Very often, these few empty words set up a sentence before getting to the main point. One of the most common is “there is” or “there are” because it tells us that…

When you read your draft and it sounds a bit flat, you might need to vary your sentence beginnings to make your writing more interesting and lively. While you can choose from many different phrases and clauses to do this, you don’t need to memorize dozens of sentence starters. Most sentences naturally begin with a…