by Suzi Elton

When you do your business writing, consider incorporating the principle of Excite, Delight and Entice. What this means is that you emotionalize your writing in such way that your readers cannot only picture themselves living a more satisfactory life, but can feel the excitement and satisfaction they would have. This produces a strong pull to explore working with you. In effect, they say to themselves, “If s/he knows enough about what I want to write like this – like they know me and my problems – I REALLY want to talk to them about what they do.”

The most gifted item this past year? The Amazon Kindle.

Years ago, I bought a Palm Tungsten C, which at the time was on the forefront of the technology frontier. It was a fantastic little device that could connect to the internet, manage a calendar, play videos, listen to music, play video games, and had more than 10,000 other little applications that programmers made for it. It could also do one other thing: read ebooks. This was long before the PDA smartphone really got going, when netbooks were just a dream.

Author: Deborah Owen

Creative writers and journalists sometimes have the problem of smoothly transitioning from one paragraph to the other, especially when they are changing the subject. This is a learned skill that is not hard to master. By the time you read this article, you will fully understand the trick to it.

When we writers hop from one topic to another without a transition sentence, we “jar” our readers. While sentence transitions may be the last line in a paragraph, they are more commonly used as the first line in a new paragraph. They are like a bridge, connecting one idea to another.

Classics. I have been talking a lot about classics recently. Classic movies. Classic World Series. Classic bands and singers. And classic books.

As I went through college, I always imagined I would end up being a high school English teacher. Maybe even a college professor. And one of my main duties would be picking a reading list for my students. As I thought about it, my temptation was to choose books they would enjoy reading.

When I first started editing the Opinion Guy, I came across the writing of Bruce Golden. His short stories always fascinated me with their strange and intuitive perspectives. His ideas were good and he was creative in the way he got them onto paper. His books are just as good. I consider him a thinking man’s writer, but his books are also wildly entertaining. Be sure to check out his website and hear what others are saying. -SC
Evergreen.The planet Evergreen is ripe for exploitation, and corporate Earth is only …

Of all the articles I have written for writers, this one is probably the one I wish they would take to heart the most. What follows are simple, seemingly common sense words of advice coming from an editor who has read thousands of submissions. However, everyday it seems I get stories or submissions that would benefit from this advice.

Editors are mostly hardworking folks who spend much of their time pouring over the written word of fledgling writers. It is not a glorious job; the writers get all the credit, the fame, and the wealth when things go well. And when things don’t, well editors get all the blame and bad eyesight.

Charlie Chaplin was a movie star who never talked. People loved those movies. I love them. But there is a reason that no production company makes silent movies anymore. People love to talk. And people love to hear what others are talking about.
Let’s look at this example. “Paul and Mary sat together on the bed talking long into the morning. Paul was surprised when he saw the sun peeking past the curtain. With much regret he rose from the bed and left, promising to return again the next night.”
What happens …

When I talk to writing students they say that merging a good character with an interesting plot is one of the hardest parts of writing. I agree. A good character is only really as good as the situations he is written into, the experiences he gets to have, the conflicts he struggles with, and the interactions he has with other characters. That is why so many writers start with a plot they think is interesting and then try to build a character from that. The only problem with that is …

By Lee Masterson
How do you describe your character’s physical appearance? It’s not always easy to describe your characters without resorting to the cliched “She looked in the mirror and saw…”
Likewise, setting the scene for each part of your story is an important element of building your fictional world. In fact, some authors go to great lengths to describe the weather patterns, the scenery and the passing traffic in detail so that the reader has a sense of the world around the characters.
This kind of descriptive narrative can sometimes be long …

Many of us have read stories or books that we have thought are quite dull. They fail to capture our fancy or our imagination. Often, the writers fail because they never truly make us believe their stories are real. We believe things are real when we see them, or touch them, or taste them, or smell them. In stories, the way to do that is detail. Believable details can convince a reader to abandon reality or even better capture a reader up into a new reality.
However, the right kind of …