The Craft of Writing Archives
For writers, what’s in a verb?
Are there different types of verbs?
There’s no reason behind listing parts of speech in any particular order. In prose, every part of speech has an important role. After considering that verbs are the soul of good writing, our choice was inevitable.
Of all the technicalities of writing well, grammar has the worst image. Mention grammar, and pictures of mind-numbing lectures dished out by monotone voices swim to the forefront of our memories, with endless lists of prepositions, irregular verbs, and other unsavory bits.
An epilogue is the section following the final chapter that tells the reader what happened after the main story is over. Often epilogues are used to wrap up questions about the story that haven’t been answered in the main story arc. This can be a powerful tool, but often it isn’t needed....more
A part or a book is crafted from several chapters to indicate a shift in time, place or point of view. Unlike chapter endings, parts must be ended, no unfinished business such as a cliffhanger. For example, a novel following a family through generations might divide each into parts. Each generation...more
Chapters must contain a scene or a group of scenes. They should be built around events that belong together and either push the plot forward or build the tension. When analyzing chapters, we must ask:
Does the chapter build tension?...more
We discussed scenes and chapters in Section XXX. When revising, we must look at several elements to ensure our scenes are tight and that we’ve included all of the necessary elements.
A preface is a short introduction before the body of the novel, and the author writes it herself. The term, as we discuss in Section XXX means any preliminary statement that covers how the book came about, or how the idea for the book was developed. ...more
The foreword is a piece of writing set at the beginning of a book or other piece of literature and before the main text. We’ve discussed just what is contained in a foreword in section XXX. In this section we’ll look at how we approach revising our forward....more
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