A title is the gateway to a story’s world. It’s the first impression, the hook that draws readers in, and can be the first signal of ‘tone’ in your story. However, crafting the right title for your short story is challenging. So, how do you choose the perfect title? Here are a few things IContinueContinue reading “Title Matters: How to Choose the Perfect Title for Your Short Story”
Author Archives: gideonpsmith
The Writer’s Journey: Crafting a Personal Roadmap to Writing Success
There is no official road map to becoming a successful writer (if I am mistaken on this point, and just no one told me about it – please share it now!). As a result, we are faced with a hundred different approaches and no guidance on which to take. Do we focus on building aContinueContinue reading “The Writer’s Journey: Crafting a Personal Roadmap to Writing Success”
Setting SMARTER Writing Goals – Part II
So in the first part I reviewed the acronym SMARTER. If you haven’t read that, this part won’t make sense so if you’d like to review just go here. For those of you up to date, we had used this framework to create an example goal saying that if what I was excited about wasContinueContinue reading “Setting SMARTER Writing Goals – Part II”
Setting SMARTER Writing Goals – Part I
Project management tools can be useful for writers, and help you stay on track. The first step in using these is setting effective goals. There are a number of frameworks that can be used. My preference is the mnemonic S.M.A.R.T.E.R. goals, an acronym that stands for: Specific – If you want to target word count,ContinueContinue reading “Setting SMARTER Writing Goals – Part I”
Writers: Do Your own Thing
All of the typical goals we have as beginning writers – writing for publication in a magazine, or to win a writing contest, push us to follow convention. To look at what exists, what has won, what has been published by that magazine, and make something that will win over the same editor. In otherContinueContinue reading “Writers: Do Your own Thing”
Making Unlikable Characters… Likable
One challenge all writers face is ensuring the characters they write about have some minimal level of likability. After all, if no one likes anything about your characters, who is going to want to read about them? This can be especially challenging if you are writing a reprehensible character. The most common approach is toContinueContinue reading “Making Unlikable Characters… Likable”
Experimenting with Dictation for Writing
Belonging to writers’ groups there’s always a lot of ideas that are thrown around. One of them is using voice dictation. While I have experimented with this to create fiction, it has never been terribly successful for me. It seems that for fiction at least my voice goes more rapidly than my brain. However, theContinueContinue reading “Experimenting with Dictation for Writing”
Exorcising Cliche
When we are reading, we often remember short phrases or sentences that somehow made something fresh again for us. That captured an image or a feeling vividly. The opposite of that is when we run across the same tired cliche we have heard a thousand times (and yes, I deliberately used a tired cliche toContinueContinue reading “Exorcising Cliche”
Polishing Manuscripts and Catching Errors with Text to Voice
One of the long-known editing tricks is to read the piece you are editing out loud to yourself. It can help you catch wrong words, awkward phrasing, homonyms, repeated words, repeated sentence structures, confusing punctuation, overlong sentences (like this one), etc. However, this can get tedious, and also, you do not always read what isContinueContinue reading “Polishing Manuscripts and Catching Errors with Text to Voice”
Developing Your Writing Toolkit
How do you develop the range or adaptability of your unique writer’s voice? One thing that I have found helpful in making progress in this is – ironically – imitating others. If you were learning to speak another language, and wanted to sound natural you probably would not settle for just ‘being understood’ – justContinueContinue reading “Developing Your Writing Toolkit”
Gideon P. Smith 