Keep Your Writing Voice Informal

The best journalism, business, and academic writing is as eloquent and enjoyable as the best writing in other genres. Unfortunately, most people do not produce the best writing. Most people produce adequate writing. Since you aspire to be a writer, I trust that regardless of the field in which you …

Use an Authentic Writing Voice

Write the way you speak, only with more polish. You may need to unlearn a lot that you learned in college about writing. Teachers teach academic writing, which tends to be dry, fact-focused, and concerned more with making a point than crafting elegant sentences. ☐ The narrative voice draws the …

How to Use Sidebars, Charts, and Images

Sidebars are a good way to include information that complements your text but that doesn’t aid the flow of your main text. Sidebars are not a good place to house information you discovered that was interesting, but unrelated to the main text. ☐ Images, charts, and sidebars are relevant and …

Use Sensory Details to Capture Imagination

Like a novelist, a nonfiction writer can engage the reader’s imagination through the use of the five senses. ☐ Vivid details enhance the reader’s understanding and highlight key points. We usually think of this kind of detail as being visual. The shape of someone’s eyeglasses, the colors of the flowers …

Why time management is so hard for creative people

Everyone in every field complains about not having enough time, even though we all have the same amount. But creative types often struggle with time management more than others. That’s mainly because organizational systems are designed by analytical types. The J’s, if you’re familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. These …

A must-listen podcast for novelists

Writing a novel is an incredibly complex task with so many moving parts it’s easy to lose track of them. That’s one reason editing is so important. You can’t—simply can’t, it’s physically and intellectually impossible—get it perfect in a single draft. Because the task is so complicated, multiple opinions about …

Structure your blog posts for simplicity

Once during a training session at the newspaper, I asked a senior editor whether he thought reporters should outline their stories. He agreed they probably should, but admitted that most don’t. I have written before about the power of the outline. When you’re writing something as short as a news …

New Manuscript Formatting Guideline

One of the great things about attending writers conferences—or any conference in your given industry—is the ability to meet with experts who know more than you and learn from them. At this year’s Florida Christian Writers Conference, I enrolled in a four-day fiction workshop taught by Ramona Richards of Abingdon …

Yes, spelling counts in novels also

You may write the most brilliant story with the most sympathetic characters, but if your manuscript is full of spelling errors and typos, you will struggle to find readers. ☐ Spelling is correct. English spelling is notoriously difficult. It is rarely phonetic, as Spanish is, and is not consistent, as …