Will Once's Blog, page 19

Happy Christmas!

All of our friends and family tell us how much they LOVE our annual Christmas letter!  And it’s that time of year again. We’ve had another absolutely FABULOUS year. The kids are doing great at school. Little Focaccia is doing really well in her ballet and drama classes. According to the ballet teacher she attacks…

Orgy Envy

After much deliberation, I’ve decided that orgies aren’t really for me. Not that I’ve ever been to an orgy, you understand. Or been invited to one. Or looked out of the window and noticed our neighbours having mass rumpy-pumpy around the barbecue. Just hypothesising. As you do. The Romans, it seems, liked nothing better than…

The magic of the first draft

I have just written a rubbish book. You’re going to love it. It has meant months of keyboard bashing. Scribbled plans on scraps of paper. Maps, inventories, a system of laws. I have held imaginary conversations with the characters, had arguments with them. We have told each other jokes. On at least one occasion we…

Why is it funny?

A review of one of my books (Global Domination for Beginners) got me thinking. It said: British humor is a subtle thing, often too subtle for a Yank like me. But this book is loaded with it. The jokes often sneaked up on me and left me laughing until I cried. And that puzzled me.…

The opposite of purple

What does good look like? Last time we talked about bad writing. In particular, we looked at purple prose – the beginner’s habit of stuffing lots of stuff into a sentence in the hope that it will make the sentence shine. But that only gives half of the answer, doesn’t it? If purple is bad,…

Depurplification

What makes writing bad? I have been thinking about this a lot recently. I am getting towards the end of the first draft of my current book. That means that I am starting to think about editing – the long and sometimes painful process of chopping out my own bad writing habits. As it happens,…

Happy birthday, Lottery

Happy birthday, UK Lottery. I hate you. It is the twentieth birthday of the UK state lottery. The newspapers are full of self-congratulatory articles about how the lottery has changed the lives of its winners. And I can’t help thinking that they are all missing the point. The lottery is a fraud, a state-sponsored deception,…

What does it mean?

This is the picture on the wall of my office. It’s what I see when I look up from the laptop. It is called Manhattan from the Brooklyn Promenade and was taken in 1954 by a fabulous photographer called Louis Stettner. Naturally, mine is a cheap poster version and not the original. But it looks…

Show not tell, young Padawan

Just about every writing textbook will give you the same piece of advice: show not tell. Instead of saying that Sir Galahad is heroic, show him doing something brave. Have him fight a dragon or rescue a princess from a tower. That sort of thing. This also applies in dialogue. Beginners tend to cram lots…

Move along, nothing so see.

Originally posted on Jim Webster:
A few thoughts from writers. “A blank piece of paper is God’s way of telling us how hard it to be God.” - Sidney Sheldon “I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story…