writing tips

The Rest of the Hemingway Effect

~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment

I’d been working on Chapter 12 of my next novel (due out in November this year, 2023) for a few days. A bit more than a thousand words in, I wrote this sentence: “He was going to need to figure out how to deal with whatever Arthur Gold had planned, but it wouldn’t do to show his hand right there.”  My brain came to a full stop. I understood I could take that sentence a whole bunch of directions. I had no idea which direction made sense. I also wasn’t sure I even liked that sentence.

I’d written about two pages (a decent amount for any morning at my desk). My brain was saying it’s time to call it quits. Something will show up tomorrow, hopefully. Maybe not. We’ll see. I wasn’t worried. However, a few years ago a shut down like that might have found me feeling incompetent or guilty or frustrated or discouraged .

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Top 3 Worthwhile Books on Writing

Three excellent books on writing in the 2020s
~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment

I discovered three excellent resources while stuck on Planet Covid Crazy back in 2021 and 2022. One is by a famous writer. One is by an experienced journalist who is also a writing instructor and editor. The last was published about a decade ago by a genius non-fiction author with a weird name I had never heard prior to March 2020. All three of these books are highly recommended for every kind of online writer — young, old, experienced, novice. They’re also vital reading for novelists, editors, online publishers, and anyone else trying to run a business in this nutso field of words and books and screens.

You may have read about some or all of these books in the past, but I’m giving my take here.

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Why There Are No Final Drafts

~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

I completed the first draft of a story called “Millie Floating” in the fall of 2004. In those days, my goal was to edit a project until I had a final draft, at which time I could send it out to publications until someone accepted it. That was naive and wrong.

Fast forward nearly two decades. “Millie Floating,” a weird little story about a guy who wonders if his wife has murdered the family dog, was published in the Toho Literary print collection, The Best Short Stories of Philadelphia 2021. It would never have been published if I’d stuck with that final draft theory.

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What Do Mistakes Say About Writers?

~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Ken Suarez on Unsplash

I have a problem here in this ultra-modern digital screenlife we’re all bouncing through. I can’t arrive at true and realistic final edits for my essays, articles, or even comments until I’ve posted online whatever I’ve composed in draft form offline.

For blog posts especially, I don’t fully catch typos and grammatical mistakes until I’m looking at my work with the awareness that there may well be real, live, anonymous people reading me out their in a big cruel opinionated world. Sometimes I catch structural problems in my work I should have seen from the beginning — maybe the need to move sentences into new positions, or ways to cut sections that I couldn’t see until the dang thing had gone global.

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Writing in a Girl’s Voice

Girl looking in a mirror
~ davidbiddle ~ 1 Comment

Never tell a character in your head to get lost

A slightly different form of this essay was published in Medium.com

One morning nearly ten years ago, a voice showed up in my head as I was walking up the stairs to my 3rd floor writing room. They were offering the beginning line of a story. By the time I sat in front of my laptop, the voice made it clear that I needed to get to work immediately. “She” absolutely was not going to leave me alone.

No one told us we were going to have a summer-long visitor until the night before that visitor arrived.

Ivy Scattergood

A few months before that, I’d gone back and read a bunch of young adult coming-of-age stories. This was around the time I was becoming acutely aware of the fact that our youngest son was about to leave home for college. I suppose that because I’m a writer going back to my reading roots made sense. Maybe others return to old music, long walks, or pre-parent hobbies.

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