Columns

Storyville: Ten Ways to Avoid Cliches and Stereotypes

April 11th, 2013

One of the ways that you can stand out as an author is to write original fiction, to have original ideas. There are a lot of different genres that have traditions rooted in certain content and form, but that doesn’t mean you have to stick with them. Here are ten suggestions for how you can avoid stereotypical stories, characters, plots, formats and other aspects of great fiction.

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Talk It Out: How To Punctuate Dialogue In Your Prose

April 10th, 2013

Punctuating Dialogue Dialogue is one of my favorite things to write, and I wish that my job as a technical writer offered more (or any) opportunities for writing it. In prose, dialogue can be a great way to get inside your characters. However, some writers find punctuating dialogue confusing: How do I use quotation marks? What is a dialogue tag? Where do the commas go? How come I see writers who don't even use quotation marks? Wait, is that an em dash?!

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Workshop Tips For Mobile Users: How To Critique on Tablets and Smartphones

April 9th, 2013

In case you didn’t know, LitReactor offers a pretty excellent Writer’s Workshop, a place you can go for critiques and advice from fellow writers. Just upload your flash, short, or long form fiction and wait for other members to submit their reviews. I won’t get into the finer points of how it works, so if you’re not familiar with this side of the site, definitely go check it out.

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You Are What You Read: The Nutritionist's Guide to Readers

April 9th, 2013

Image via Free Images How do you read? We posed the question on Unprintable Episode 9 and discovered we had some questionable habits when it comes to book consumption. Listen to the cast to find out what Josh, Rob and I admitted to and in the meantime decide where you fall on the dietary spectrum of reading types:

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Book vs. Film vs. Audience: The Shining and Room 237

April 8th, 2013

The Book vs. Film vs.

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Recap: Game of Thrones 3.02 - Dark Wings, Dark Words

April 8th, 2013

This is going to contain spoilers for this episode, and also for the books. I won't tell you what happens in the fifth book, or what I think is going to happen in the next episode, but I will talk about differences between the book and the show thus far. Deal with it.

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Top 10 Storytelling Cliches Writers Need To Stop Using

April 5th, 2013

Header image by Viridiana O Rivera Cliché is the enemy of good writing.  We, as writers, are trained to kill clichéd phrases in sentences. But that's not the only place they can hide—they can infect the spaces between the words, too. Clichés can infect storytelling techniques.

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Roger Ebert Dies at 70

April 5th, 2013

Roger Ebert’s death at the age of 70 sparks a number of questions, none of which I am prepared to answer: What was Ebert’s impact on American culture? Was he a great critic? Will his criticism stand the test of time? Will anyone still care what he wrote ten years from now? To all those questions, I must answer – I dunno.

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10 Big-Time Literary Druggies

April 5th, 2013

In the early 1970s, an anti-drug propaganda piece hit the airwaves: a grim-faced fellow displayed a hideous painting purportedly created by someone on acid. It was a violent work, one that appeared to have been painted with barbed wire instead of a brush, and if memory serves, the color palette was limited to black, grey, and a particularly nauseating blood red.

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Six Types Of Poems To Banish Writers Block

April 4th, 2013

April is National Soft Pretzel Month in the U.S. It’s also National Jazz Appreciation Month, National Welding Month, and National Poetry Month. And while we have absolutely nothing against soft pretzels, jazz, or welding, we figured a column pertaining to National Poetry Month would be most relevant to your interests. If we’re wrong, perhaps you could eat a soft pretzel while you read this.

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