WRITE

links to items in the
WRITING GUIDANCE section
("How to Write")

Page 208 — Item Thirty-Four
A FICTION TEMPLATE

Simple instructions for constructing a plot. A recipe, like a recipe for baking cookies. Some assembly required. Life experience is helpful: getting married, working on fishing trawlers, going to war, joining an organized crime gang, entering politics, living in a cardboard box for a couple of years, whatever. That said, this lean passage pretty much communicates what is teachable regarding plot construction. Read it and believe it. An expert writes.

Page 219 — Item Thirty-Five —
BOY HAS ALREADY MET GIRL

A simple solution to handling the boy meets girl business.

Page 221 — Item Thirty-Six —
PRACTICAL WRITING MECHANICS

Work habits, keeping track of work done, plot and promise. how many characters should there be? Managing transitions. Being satisfied with a simple straightforward workable sentence.

Page 230 — Item Thirty-Seven —
THE PLANET OR THE SHOE

A set of writing exercise. If you have total facility then you will learn nothing from this. If some things turn out to be easier than others then you may be able to extract a lesson from the experiment. If you cannot, then you cannot: the experiment is offered, but is not explained. Hint: to the extent that there is a message, the message can be extracted from the title, “The Planet or the Shoe’.

Page 234 — Item Thirty-Eight —
PROOFREADING AND EDITING

A long and deeply serious look at proofreading and editing, over seven thousand words going into details of how to hunt for typos, how to edit so things make sense and how to tweak the text for style. Warning: your sense of good style is, ultimately, your own, and my stylistic notions may not be yours.