53 Search results for “learning to write”.
Learning to Write XXXI
How do you weed out characters that aren’t earning their keep? A character doesn’t earn his or her keep when they do nothing interesting with or in opposition to the leading characters in your narrative. If they are your leading characters you need to stop writing and return to the stage of thinking about your […]
Learning to Write at Hay
Fifty people turned up in the Drill Hall for the Hay-on-Wye Writing Workshop, quite surprising when you consider that the fee was £25.00 per head for a two-hour session. Maybe billing it as a practical masterclass in the Festival Programme did the trick? The high entrance fee also begged the question of who would turn […]
Learning to Write XXX
In casual conversation all speakers slur vowels, drop final consanants and take short-cuts through syntax. Don’t tell me this only occurs with people on the lower rungs of the social scale. If you believe that, you haven’t learned to listen yet. In the latest post in this series I suggested that speech transferred to the […]
Learning to Write XXIX
Try writing down a paragraph as spoken by someone with a foreign accent. Or write down five or six sentences spoken by someone in your family. In both cases you will find that your listening ability is limited to grasping the meaning of what the speaker says and to more or less disregard his or her way of saying it.
Learning to Write XXVIII
I’ve managed to avoid talking about dialogue in this series up to now, but eventually it has to be dealt with. I don’t think it’s possible to deal with it adequately in one post. So what I have to say will be supplemented later by a couple of additional posts. It is a complicated subject […]
