Please, No!
By Annette Rey
F&W Media, the publisher of Writer’s Digest and more than fifty other magazines, announced Chapter 11 bankruptcy due to plummeting subscriptions and advertising revenue.
I invoke the little boy’s words as he looked up into the face of his hero, a beloved baseball player accused of throwing the 1919 World Series in the infamous Black Sox Scandal, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”
Finding Motive
By Annette Rey
So many things to incorporate in your characters, right? You can run dry inventing.
Here’s a real quick shortcut to help you to continue growing your characters in a believable way.
Cut Your Babies
By Annette Rey
Many writers want to meet a word count and fear they won’t be able to reach that objective. So they spew. That’s not a totally bad thing. Their problems arise when they find they have over-extended and need to eliminate words for the sake of their word count. Their words are their babies. “But I like the way it sounds now!”
Word count be damned, put concision in position one. You will find that if you focus on concision, clarity follows.
Look, Think, Write
By Annette Rey
Writer’s block? Okay, we’ve been over this before.
Step One: Look around your room.
Step Two: What do you see?
Step Three: Name it out loud.
Step Four: What thoughts are conjured by those words?
Step Five: Write about it.
It really is that simple.
Why? Because you are a creative writer, that’s why. Believe in yourself.
By Annette Rey
Amanuensis
The word amanuensis is pronounced very easily and exactly as it looks phonetically.
uh manu in sis
A writer should know this word because we’d all like to hire one to make our lives easier!
An amanuensis is a literary or artistic assistant who takes dictation and copies manuscripts.
How much fun that would be to have, right? I can only daydream about this – having someone else process my pile of work. I would train him to help me in the marketing process, too. I would also add to his workload researching submission markets for me.
That would provide me with a perfect day to spend entirely on my creative writing!
I’d like to just meet an amanuensis! Hmmm, I wonder what they charge.
This is another Wonderful Word for people like me and you – to hear its poetry of sound, its very soul. I admit, I look at words as personal friends. And that’s not a bad viewpoint because, as a writer, words serve me well.
Amanuensis – a beautiful word, indeed.
