I have a guest blog at Seekerville-- The Top Five Mistakes.
Alicia
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Got Editing Questions?
If you have an editing question you'd like us to address, feel free to send it to rasley at gmail dot com. We like reader questions because they save us from having to think up post topics on our own. ;)
Readers' Choice for Top Ten Blog Posts
- 1. Top Ten Reasons the Editor Doesn't Love What Your Critique Group Loves
- 2. How to Put It Together Into One Neat Tweet
- 3. Marks of the Amateur - Starting a List
- 4. When Unnamed Characters Speak
- 5. Character-Driven/Plot-Driven
- 6. The Words Not Spoken, the Steps Not Taken
- 7. This Was in the Comments, But It's a Great Question, So Let's Discuss--
- 8. Dialogue Tags
- 9. Enjambment in Fiction
- 10. Thoughts on Pacing - Nothing Brilliant
Readers' Choice for Best Series by Alicia
Readers' Choice for Best Series by Theresa
Readers' Choice for Best Series by Both Editors
Theresa's Dubious Honor
Useful Sites for Writers
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2010
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- From the Style Guide: Who/Whom
- This Picture's Worth 50,000 Words
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- I don't have a Kindle, but...
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- Speaking of cliches-
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- Force the conflict!
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- About the December Workshop
- Writers who love too much
- Prologues in general, let's debate!
- On NaNo
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When Theresa's not reading manuscripts, she's reading:
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Posts
4 comments:
Great article. I particularly liked what you did with the opening paragraph. The first example is perfectly decent writing, and perfectly poinless - I love the way you show how you can take that and focus is on conflict/character/setting.
However, the question I really want to see answered (can we please have an edittorrent post on the subject? Pretty please with cream on top?) is what comes next. Presumably you'll want to focus the following paragraphs, too - but how do you decide which focal points to choose?
And I can see how a writer who wanders all over the place would create a disunited feeling in the back of the reader's head, while another would give a piece a sense of purpose... but how do you get it right?
GK, good question!
I do have some thoughts about openings, so I'll see if I can do a post. Mostly I think any focus is better than no focus.
Alicia
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