Peg Herring's Blog – July 2008 Archive (23)

A Simple One, But ...(R)

I used to teach high school, and that's a job where you see a range of writing skills, from pretty darned good to downright awful. One mistake often made but easily corrected is starting sentences with the same word over and over. Particularly in passages where things are happening to a protag, it's difficult to avoid repeating "He" or "She" or in the case of first-person narrative, "I" as the first word of a sentence. This isn't limited to student writing. I've seen some big-name authors,… Continue

Added by Peg Herring on July 3, 2008 at 9:55pm — 2 Comments

A Female Historical Character's Mindset

One of the problems with writing historical fiction is getting the mindset right, and I think that's particularly true with women in certain eras. Taught all their lives to defer to men, they might not even consider things that women today don't think twice about: contacting a strange man at his home, questioning a man's motives, or asking personal questions that a man doesn't want to answer. The nearest comparison I can think of is a child around five years old doing such things today. It… Continue

Added by Peg Herring on July 2, 2008 at 11:14pm — 2 Comments

What You Gonna Call Your Pretty Little Baby?

Okay, so I stole that one from a Christmas song.

Choosing a title is sometimes tough, sometimes easy. Some stories just naturally generate a title and others may not be titled until the last possible moment. Unfortunately it's sometimes much later that you know whether you chose the right name for your story or not. A publisher may sometimes retitle the work, and I've spoken with authors who liked the change and others who didn't. Publishers usually win those arguments.

We… Continue

Added by Peg Herring on July 1, 2008 at 10:20pm — 1 Comment