Morning Round-up May 23, 2013: Blocking metaphors earthquake!
How to Write a Novel: 7 Tips Everyone Can Use
1. Write the story you’d most want to read. Don’t write a story just because you think it might be a bestseller or that it would make Great Aunt Edna proud. Think about the books you love, the ones you really lose yourself in. If those are mysteries, then don’t try to write an historical romance or a quiet literary novel. It might not be anything genre-specific that you love, but a certain voice, or type of story, or kinds of characters. Write what you love. Do me a favor — right now, today, start a list of all your crazy obsessions, the things that get your heart pumping, that wake you up in the middle of the night. Put it above your desk and use it to guide you, to jumpstart your writing each and every day.
30 Quick Editing Tips Every Content Creator Needs to Know
Has your brilliant content still not scored you that dream writing position, lucrative business partnership, or sweet recognition among your peers and target audience?
Top 10 young adult books for summer
Whether your summer destination is the beach, the mountains or the same old routine, these top new YA titles will help entertain you through the season.
Rules for writing: block that metaphor!
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, the former Labour Scotland minister, said the other day of Nigel Farage: “He is like a bull in a china shop and has just come into Scottish politics with flat feet and muddied the water.” (The Ukip leader, heckled by protesters in Edinburgh, had been locked in a pub by police before being carted off to safety in the back of a riot van.) Such turns of phrase appear occasionally as fillers in the New Yorker, usually culled from the pages of lesser publications, under the heading: “Block That Metaphor!” It’s sound advice, on the whole. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with mixed metaphors, if they are well mixed: by flooding his china shop, Foulkes almost comes up with an evocative image, though he rather spoils it with the flat-hooved bull. But they are usually the result of carelessness or overambition, and either way make for baffling reading.
