Subscribe in a reader

Some words of wisdom from Professor and Published Author James A. Janke

Send in your writing tips!

• Be specific in your writing. The more specific the detail, the more real the story will seem to the reader.
• The best fiction can come from the preposterous imaginations of writers who are good storytellers.
• Becoming a skilled typist (on a word processor) is extremely useful to a writer.
• Very few people make a living at writing fiction.
• Revision is important. A writer can always do one more revision. At some point the writer has to stop revising and get the work published.
• Show, don’t tell.

• Avoid starting a story with dialogue.
• Don’t use clichés.
• The more detail in the story, the more interesting the story.
• Revise, revise, revise, revise, . . .
• Avoid author intrusion.
• Write what you like to read.
• Don’t use exclamation points.
• Use surprise and irony.
• The shorter the story, the more important each word becomes.
• Descriptions and technical details must be authentic; when the reader suddenly realizes that the writer made a mistake, the reader is jarred out his or her temporary acceptance of the story as reality, i.e., author intrusion.
• Avoid overused words.
• Success breeds success. The more published you are, the easier it is to get published again.
• Every word can be used appropriately somewhere in some story.
• Don’t tell what happened; recreate what happened.
• The beginning of a story must be interesting. Readers can be lost on page one.
• Scorning the work of a writer does not make that writer a better writer.

Most Importantly

The best advice to any writer, published or not, is to remember…

Whatever rules or tips you read about writing you will be able to find some published work that violates them. Sometimes the violation is glaring and amounts to author intrusion. Other times the violation may actually help the story. Usually the latter occurs when the writer actually is an excellent wordsmith and deliberately, with great specific purpose, violates some rule or tip.
–James A. Janke

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts