Posts Tagged by writers
The Dangers of Editing Your Own Writing
| February 19, 2011 | Posted by JerriCook under The Writing Process |
The Madonna of Humility
Familiarity not only breeds contempt, it breeds mistakes. I heard from a Countryside reader about an article I wrote for the March/April 2011 issue. In the piece, I quote the FDA’s assertion that over the last 13 years, 800 people have become ill after drinking raw milk. Then, two paragraphs later, without realizing it, I changed the facts by stating that 800 deaths were, indeed, tragic. Eight-hundred people were sickened, not killed, after drinking raw milk.
I’m grateful for the reader who pointed it out. I’m also humbled. Not only did I not catch the mistake as I was writing the piece, no one else in the editorial chain caught it either. It happens. There are two important lessons here for writers: 1) Don’t edit your own work, and 2) don’t edit the work of others when you have a personal interest in the subject matter. (more…)
Can You Chop Wood And Write At The Same Time?
| January 23, 2011 | Posted by JerriCook under Becoming a writer, The Writing Process |
Everyone’s busy. For some of us, it’s all we can do to keep up with our everyday schedule, let alone find time to write. The good news is that you can write while you do other things, like split wood or weed the garden. As it happens, mundane tasks allow our minds to wander, and let’s face it—it’s wandering minds that return to reality with ideas fresh from the astral territories. The only problem is remembering them. Fetching a drop of inspiration from the ethereal and remembering it are two different processes. You might think you’ll recall the idea when you have a moment to sit down and write, but ask any writer who has let the brilliance of their subconscious slip away before they could write it down, and they’ll tell you how wrong you are. (more…)
X Marks The Spot: Finding the Treasures In Your Writing
| January 6, 2011 | Posted by JerriCook under Freewriting, Prompts, The Writing Process, Writer's Block |
Your writing is a map to new treasures
In the documentary, What the Bleep Do We Know?, it’s postured that the Indians didn’t comprehend what the ships of the first settlers were because they couldn’t connect the image with any experience or prior thought. The ships were so alien in nature that they were effectively invisible. More succinctly put: they didn’t see what they weren’t looking for. Who knows if the story about the Indians not “seeing” the first sails of the first pilgrims arriving in the New World is true? It doesn’t matter. What matters is there’s a gem here for writers, and I promise you, where’s there’s one gem, there are troves more.
We all have a shared experience—every one of us has searched for something that was right under our nose, but the mental image we had of the object and what it actually looked like weren’t connected. Once we realized this and made the mental connection, we were able to quickly locate whatever it was we were searching for. When you write, you might think you know what you’re looking for, but keep an eye open for some sparkling, seemingly quirky idea that leads you off on a tangent. Your writing is a map and that tangent connects to a treasure that sits unrecognized right in front of you. (more…)
The Punctuation Buffet: Comma, Colon, or Em Dash?
| January 2, 2011 | Posted by JerriCook under Punctuation, Structure, Uncategorized |
Don't pile it on too high at the punctuation buffet.
Writers have an array of punctuation choices, just like a patron at buffet. It all looks so good, but too much mixing and matching or piling it on too high has gastronimical consequences. We want to give our readers a smooth treat, properly seasoned and delivered. That’s where punctuation and style meet—at the punctuation buffet, and like any other buffet, some things are just standard. The punctuation buffet always has commas, colons, and em dashes. The trick is to pick the right helping for your style, which is the plate you offer to your reader.
Commas have been described as speed bumps, but I prefer to think of them as fork-sized bites. Use a comma when you are adding just a taste of something complementary to the fork, like you would if you were eating a salad. Pick up a piece of lettuce, a bite of tomato, and dip the whole thing lightly into the dressing. Commas tie things together that belong together. (more…)
The Death Of The Dash: Using Hyphens
| December 24, 2010 | Posted by JerriCook under Punctuation |
The dash is dead.
The dash is dead, but I doubt that anyone will be attending the funeral. Writers won’t miss it. The modern trend in punctuation is to replace dashes with hyphens. This is a welcomed trend for writers who would rather concentrate on content than convoluted rules of punctuation.
Hyphens are used to connect two words used as an adjective when the last word is a verb:
battery-powered car
milk-drinking fool
game-playing goat
Learning The Ropes: Surviving On The Freelance Writing Market
| December 20, 2010 | Posted by JerriCook under Becoming a writer |
Most magazines pay for FNSAR.
Always tell editors when submitting a second-run piece. Some smaller publishers are willing to take second-run pieces, but they pay substantially less, if anything, for the rights. Failure to disclose that something has appeared in another publication will injure your reputation in a hurry, not to mention the damage it could cause to your bank account should the publisher decide to sue you. (more…)
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