All the Grammar Knowledge You Need for NaNo
National Novel Writing Month is not the time to become a grammar expert. The entire idea of this challenge is to stop worrying and write, that is, to churn out 1600+ words of prose each day, prose whose main glory is that it exists, not that it is perfect. Stopping to study capitalizing, punctuation, and sentence structure can only be a distraction, and probably a dispiriting one. That said, NaNoWriMo is also not a great time to be slowed down by worrying whether you’ve punctuated this...
Read MoreUseful Things of the Week
I don’t know if I’m actually going to make this a weekly post, but I suppose it depends on how much cool and useful stuff I find over the course of the week. An excellent quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Airman’s Odyssey comes to mind as I revise another article: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Deleting excess words, trimming a piece down to its...
Read MorePersonal Organization with “The Ultimate List”
From GetYeDone to scribbles on post it notes, I think it’s pretty clear that I love to-do lists. They give at least the illusion of control over a busy writer’s life, allowing me to organize tasks verbally and spatially, and most of all there’s something very satisfying about striking through my latest conquest. Only recently, though, have I seriously considered the motivational effect a well-organized to do list can have, above and beyond the momentary glow of...
Read MoreList: Everything That Can Go Wrong (a Mix-n-Match Adventure)
Storytelling is problem solving–to have a plot, you need a problem for your characters to confront. Then the plot needs a reason behind it, and you have to make clear what’s at stake if the problem isn’t solved, while having some idea how your characters are going to solve it. Over the weekend I started brainstorming problems-stakes-causes-and-solutions with a particular series in mind (another one!? Yes, another one). But as I went on I realized this list might serve as a...
Read MoreMadwoman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge–the personalities of writing
This week my internship brought me to the Writing Staycation at the Writer’s Center of Bethesda, where my supervisor, Zahara Heckscher, is leading a dedicated group of writers on a 9-5 retreat with the goal of sharing ideas, considering mission and goals of writing, and most importantly getting some words down on the page. While I’m there to perform a number of internship duties (the staff at Trader Joe’s are becoming familiar with me) and to assist with the...
Read MoreList: What’s surprised me most about Ghana
When I was younger, and I wasn’t sure what to write but I knew I wanted to write something, I would make lists–to keep my thoughts in order, to generate some brainstorming, to summarize or highlight my ideas. I have a jumble of ideas and memories from Ghana, so one way to sort them out–and give a preliminary taste of my trip–is to give you a list. A list of the things that most surprised me on my first trip abroad: *The Handshake. One of my classmates had spent the...
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