Recent content by Jim Aikin

Sometimes I'll take a break for a couple of days if I'm feeling burnt out. But for me there's a difference between needing a break and just feeling reluctance. I feel reluctance sometimes in the morning before I start writing -- but my goal is 2,000 words a day. So I sit down and start writing...

No -- sorry about that. I didn't read the entire thread, I just jumped in.

I have to jump in here. I think Chesterama is being defensive. A writer's prose style can tell us (even within a few paragraphs) a great deal about the author's thinking style (or ability). Dismissing prose style as irrelevant is just wrong. It's true that there are no rules. You can write in...

(1) Colorful words. (2) Solidly constructed sentences. (3) Appeal directly to the senses. (4) Choose details that can hint at other things you haven't said. For example, a little while ago I wrote a description of three men in a dingy pub, and mentioned that they were sitting at a much-scarred...

An interesting perspective, to be sure, but I balked at this: "More and more publishers seem to be ... taking in their own slush for short periods. They're a lottery (but so is a sub by an agent, frankly)...." An agent submission is not, I would suggest, a lottery. First, an established agent...

I'm not an authority on human languages, but can you give an example or two of blends that you didn't think worked well? The Celtic languages (including Welsh) are rather interesting -- words without vowels. Hawaiian is interesting because there are, I think, only five consonants. And then...

Basically silly, but fun to think about. Is my dialog expressive or stoic? I think that depends on the character, or on what's going on in a particular scene. Sometimes a description needs to be concise, sometimes it needs to be detailed. I probably lean toward hefty prose, but hefty prose can...

This is great advice. Revision can mean anything from choosing a better adjective here or there to adding or deleting whole sections. Revision can be painful, but it's essential.

The thing I found most useful in critique groups (I've been in a couple, years ago) was reading manuscripts by others and watching them do it wrong! Seeing someone else fumble and grope with viewpoint, motivation, or description is far more useful than reading the work of a polished...

Hmm. When did this modern maintenance start? No more recently than the 19th century, I would imagine. So the ruins survived from, let's say, 475 C.E., when Rome fell and maintenance would essentially have ceased, to maybe 1875, with no maintenance at all. Gradually crumbling the entire time, to...

Hmm. I could be entirely wrong about this, but I seem to recall reading that the Romans invented not only concrete but also rebar, and that that's why the Colosseum is still standing! And the aqueducts.

I'll buy a modern 16-year-old refusing to be a damsel in distress, and using that exact phrase. But I would argue that there's a difference between her consciously using a cliche phrase and having her criticize something on the grounds that it's a cliche. The latter feels too much to me like the...

So she has been kidnapped into a faery realm that the author acknowledges is riddled with cliches? That can hardly be good. I'm thinking of "The War of the Flowers" by Tad Williams (if memory serves), in which Faery turns out to be not a cliche at all, except intermittently in a calculated...

Your reader is right. What's really going on in these passages is that the writer's (your) subconscious is objecting to the material because it's trite. In the second passage, if she's trapped she will certainly think about using a bedsheet -- and if she objects to it on the grounds that it's a...

Here's my list (which I posted not long ago on my blog): Scott Meredith, Writing to Sell (out of print). Meredith is a terrible Philistine. He doesn’t give a crap about art. But if you want to sell books, this is a great resource. Jean Z. Owen, Professional Fiction Writing (out of print). A...