In my inbox, a letter from a fellow writer: “How are you, really?” she asked, not just to me, but to all the writers she knows. She asked because she, too, is living through this time when every week brings a new, devastating knife to our society’s heart. She knew we are all suffering. How […]
voice
So Many Words, So Little Time
We’re a wordy bunch, we English speakers. According to the Oxford Dictionaries’ Lexico website (“How Many Words Are There in the English Language?”), “The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989, contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative […]
Giving Voice to Your Characters
by Kelley Lindberg For the last two weeks, we’ve been discussing different aspects of “voice.” Your voice is the unique sound to your writing that sets your story apart from everyone else’s. They say there are only a handful of basic stories. It’s how we tell them that distinguishes them. Some writers elevate the idea […]
Using Voice to Establish Mood
by Kelley Lindberg Voice – it’s that elusive, yet all-important quality that makes your book uniquely yours. It’s how you observe and write about things. It’s the language you use. It’s the language your characters use. It’s the details that you choose to expound upon, the emotions you sketch upon the page, and the pacing […]
Do Your Sentences Have a Sense of Rhythm?
by Kelley Lindberg Email question of the week: “How can I better improve the flow of paragraphs and sentences? The rhythm, that is.” Great question. As you know already, there won’t be any easy answers because this is where it all becomes incredibly personal to you and that mysterious, amorphous quality called “your voice.” (In other words, […]
