Top 10 Storytelling Cliches Writers Need To Stop Using

Column by Rob Hart April 5, 2013 202 comments
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Top 10 Storytelling Cliches Writers Need To Stop Using

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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

Column by Ed Sikov April 5, 2013 4 comments
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Roger Ebert Dies at 70

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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

Column by Ed Sikov April 5, 2013 25 comments
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10 Big-Time Literary Druggies

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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

Column by Kimberly Turner April 4, 2013 3 comments
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Six Types Of Poems To Banish Writers Block

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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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On Writer's Constipation, The Sophomore Slump and Zombies

Column by Dana Fredsti April 3, 2013 3 comments
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On Writer's Constipation, The Sophomore Slump and Zombies

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Before I started work on Plague Nation, the second book in my Ashley Parker series, I'd heard fellow writers discuss the Sophomore Slump with varying degrees of emotion from grumbling to near-psychotic ranting, complete with the kind of laughter that generally follows statements like "And they all said I was mad.  MAD, I say!"   At the time, I'd had three or four books published in various genres.

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Cut!: 4 Strategies for Trimming Your Content

Column by Rob Blair Young April 3, 2013 4 comments
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Cut!: 4 Strategies for Trimming Your Content

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A deluge of unnecessary content or verbiage can destroy your work. When it's time to revise your over-written piece, how can you make cuts that avoid castrating it? Take it from a chronic over-writer: Making cuts isn't an easy process. However, there are some helpful techniques. Here are four strategies I use when revising my own work.

1) Be goal-oriented

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Storyville: Dissecting "Fireflies"

Column by Richard Thomas April 2, 2013 6 comments
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Storyville: Dissecting "Fireflies"

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This week I’ll be dissecting another of my stories, “Fireflies.” It was originally published in Polluto and later online at Circa Review. It’s been a while since I did this, and I’m excited to dig into this story for a number of reasons. First, this was one of my first attempts to write magical realism. It was also one of my first attempts in recent memory to write a short story that had a positive core, a center that was built around love, romance, and nostalgia.

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