With 2012 drawing to a close, we wanted to share a few of our favorite articles from DIY MFA with you. But before we get to that, here’s a recap of how DIY MFA works. While in graduate school, I discovered that the typical Creative Writing MFA boils down to one simple formula. Some graduate… Read more »
This week, we’re talking about description and detail. On Monday we established that Description Equals Does Not Equal Exposition. Today we’re going to discuss how to make those descriptive passages more powerful. Here are five tips, plus a writing exercise at the end to help you put them into action. 1) Engage the Five Senses…. Read more »
Dialogue is easy to spot because it has those nifty little quotation marks, but not all text that isn’t dialogue can be lumped together. The difference between description and exposition can be tricky to determine but it is most definitely there. The key is to remember this equation: How can we distinguish between description and… Read more »
I first learned to sketch out a story in a novel-writing class. The purpose of the sketch is to provide a snapshot of your work-in-progress (WIP), capturing all the important information on one page so that you can see it all at a glance. This technique is especially useful when you need to give a short excerpt… Read more »
Last week we talked about Point of View and one reader raised a fascinating point in the comments about the narrative distance between first and third person. As I thought about this point, I realized that verb tense also affects the narrative distance, hence this post about verb tense and how that affects the viewpoint… Read more »
