Welcome!

Thanks for stopping by at our blog. We wanted to lend voice to a collaboration of writers who are at different stages in their careers, from published down to those penning or editing their first novels. So wherever you’re at in your writing, here’s a place to stop and refuel, find information and get retrofitted with new ideas.

Be passionate. Be bold. Pick up a pen. Find your journey in ink.

Write us at inkiesrus@yahoo.com

Coming Soon! Love and Lighter Fluid

Tirzah Goodwin’s  poetry book, Love and Lighter Fluid, will be available February 15th, 2011.

Poetry is so personal.  It’s who you are in the moment, whether that’s funny, sad, mean, and honest.  Poetry, unlike fiction, is all about the inner world of the poet.  And words.  You can’t forget the words.  Hah.

What’s in it?

Biting poems, funny poems, wonderfully wicked poems.  Want a taste?  Check out Tin Relationships and Bluebells, which has an audio link.

Congratulations, Tirzah!

Love Your Work Enough to Hate It

Yes, you heard right.  Go ahead. Hate it.

Sometimes your work really does suck.

The first book I wrote is wonderful in places, but it’s flawed in too many ways to be fixed without a major rewrite.

My MC’s 19, risky age, being too old for YA, too young for adult. And it has structural failure–the main conflict, dilemma, goal, desire, is resolved before the climax, and it should hold taut until at least that point. It also relies too much on coincidence and may break true FBI procedure. I love quality enough to know this book just isn’t publishable.

Practicing, getting your work critiqued and reading about craft & for pleasure will help you recognize the good, the bad and the ugly in your work.

When I wrote my second novel, Kings & Queens, I better understood structure. In that, readers and my MC are aware of a massacre plot in chapter 1, and the whole truth about the why, who and how is not revealed to readers or my MC until the epilogue.

Not everyone can do that, and I’m not saying you have to stretch it THAT far, but to have a hooky work—which is the best kind IMO—the big concern presented at the onset shouldn’t be resolved until as late as possible, and definitely not until the climax.

Sometimes your work IS good, but needs the perspective of others besides your mom to make it oh-so-fabulous.

Don’t be afraid of criticism. Yes, that’s your baby, and yes, you have a delicate soul, but most critters want to help you take you and your work to a higher level. Take what works for your story and ditch the rest.

Hate your work enough to be objective and at least consider that they may be right. After several people complained of things being confusing, I changed things to bring clarity.

And sometimes your work IS almost ready for shelves, but could still use another glance over.

Definitely do it. Go over it one more time, looking at everything: flow, meter, voice, grammatical errors, wordiness. I’ll probably keep toiling and tweaking until I’m signed.

With my edit this past spring spring though, in trying to get work count down, I stripped out nearly every adjective and got sentences down to bare bones, and the writing lost its sparkle and MY VOICE. Not good! So, I ended up replacing a lot of what I cut and just decided I’d reached my word count and that was that.

Well, I really need a much smaller word count. So this week, I decided to go at it again, but I set out with a different tactic. Here are the ways I was able to trim, no lie, 1300 words from my first SEVEN chapters. Yippee! And the cool thing is the scenes don’t seem any emptier. They’re not sparse or choppy. The flow is nice. I’m very happy. It’s just kind of embarrassing that I had that much to trim and didn’t see it. You can keep these tips in mind if your work is in need of a major hack-and-slash.

Ø For the most part, keep modifiers to one per noun. Slay extra extras. Removing ALL strips out color, so don’t do that. Rather, go for vivid, concise pictures. Is it really important to say his polo shirt’s blue? If he gets mistaken for someone else wearing a similar shirt, then his shirt color factors into plot. Keep it. Just consider everything, whether it’s needed or not.

Ø Choose punchy verbs over an adverb-verb combo.

Ø Omit unnecessary dialogue tags, action or anything that disrupts flow during a conversation.

Ø Examine dialogue and say the same thing in fewer words. I hacked off so much when I broke speech down to the guts.

Ø Take a machete to exposition. Since it’s the Narrator spilling info, it pulls readers from the scene and somewhat breaks POV.  Examine those scene-killers, hack away, keeping only the most vital bits.

Originally in ch. 1, I stopped to describe this hangout called Spanky’s. The info’ really wasn’t needed. I offed 75 words, keeping the one line that held some voice–a mini-golf/ice cream shop gone wild.

And chapter 4 had four paragraphs describing my character, Derek’s lousy upbringing, thought process, fears, etc. I cut 200 words and it’s now one spiffy graph. What I did keep relates to his thoughts.

Ø Do some telling. I know we’re told to show not tell, but in many cases, showing adds words. Showing is important for engagement, but if you’re a writer with 90-95 show percentage, don’t be afraid to take it down to 70%, or 80 if you’re squeamish about it.

Ø Kill your darlings. Sometimes we love the specific way we word sentences, but look at each construction with fresh eyes and think, can I convey this tighter? Be ruthless. Rewrite and reorganize sentences rather than just trimming down what you’ve got so you can maintain voice.

Ø Look for extraneous articles, prepositions, that’s, evens and other extras that can be cut off and not missed.

Ø Perform magic with better word choices. [e.g. He went up the stairs, two at a time…He whooshed up the stair…He double-stepped the stairs.]

Ø Get in some dirty talking and thoughts. Dialogue doesn’t need to be perfect English and thoughts can be broken because people don’t always think in complete sentences. [e.g. "Can’t wait for football season to start!"...or "Goin' home?"..."Excited about your new job?"...Boss sucks!]

And people blend many, many words–gotta, wanna, kinda, sorta, hafta, should’ve, that’d (contraction for that would…That’d be okay.). Stripping out formality, when it’s fitting for the speaker, not only trims words, it helps your characters seem more real and you less stuffy.

Ø Expand your vocabulary. Sometimes a perfect, juicy word can replace two or three. [e.g. come up with v. devise.]

Ø And don’t forget to remove as many filters as you can like he saw, she could sense. Just name the stimulus or spill what the character is thinking or experiencing. [e.g. She wondered if he could read her mind. v. Could he read her mind?] If you’re firmly locked into one POV, such trims won’t be jarring at all.

Strangely, with all this excess baggage shed out of my manuscript, I feel refreshed and exhilarated, knowing my work is cleaner and overall better.

Don’t be afraid to have a love-hate relationship with your work. You’ll be a much better writer for it.

All the best!

~ CV

Podcasting Gives Voice to Your Writing

I’ve recently begun podcasting. It’s not writing related, but I do think podcasting is a great way to promote your writing projects. The different ways podcasting can be used by writers is only limited by their imagination. I’ve been listening to different podcasts. Some writers are broadcasting their poems or reading excerpts from their novels. They may be selling songs, e-books, or audio books to go along with their podcast. Some writers have collaborative podcasts, and use their podcast to announce writing related news and conduct interviews. Others are using podcasts to teach the mechanics of writing or promoting. 

It’s fairly easy to start podcasting. You just need a sound card and a microphone. If you have sound on your computer, then you should be fine. If you don’t have a microphone, you can pick one up at Office Depot or Best Buy for under $30. I purchased a great headset at Best Buy for $24, but I saw one online at Office Depot for under $5.

I signed up for an account with podbean.com. Originally, I was using Sound Recorder on my computer, but I didn’t care for it. For one thing, it only allows for sixty seconds of recording time. There is a way around that, and it wasn’t difficult to figure out. However, I didn’t like the sound quality that I ended up with. Even though it was a blank tape, I kept getting some static in the final recording.

I then switched over to mypodcast.com. They have a great recorder that can be downloaded for free when you sign up with them. You can also earn money through commercials that are embedded in your podcast. Unfortunately, their website is confusing — to put it mildly — and not well thought out. I believe it is still in the beta stage, and it shows. I ended up going back to podbean.com. There are many other podcasting sites, and a quick google search will help you track them down. I believe Blog Talk Radio is considered to be the best, but I found it confusing.

If you do decide to start podcasting, there is quite a bit of information online about how to get started. I lack the patience to wade through all of that, so I just jumped in and started podcasting. I found it to be straight forward. Podbean is very user friendly, and I had no trouble getting started. The site is very slow at times, and be sure to save your work frequently or you’ll lose it — especially if it takes several minutes to write out your post.

Your podcasts can even be subscribed to through iTunes. Which I think is pretty cool. You can also share them on Facebook, My Space, and at blogs.

Podcasting is a great way to promote your books and your self, but I find it to be somewhat addictive. I’m not very good at it, but I’m hoping I’ll improve with time. The episodes where I ad lib are by far the best, so it’s probably best to be prepared but still be flexible.

I believe most podcasting sites are free to join. However, if you plan to do quite a few podcasts, you’ll run out of disk and archive usage, so you will probably need to upgrade in order to continue podcasting. It’s inexpensive though, and it might be worth the small investment. I think it could help readers connect to you in ways that your written word might never achieve. It gives voice to your writing.

http://prophecypod.podbean.com/

Hurry Up and Wait!

How to survive the publishing industry’s waiting game.

                There’s a lot of waiting involved when you’re a first time author.

After you write the book, you have to wait while friends and fellow authors read it for editing purposes. After it’s edited to death and back again, you have to send out queries to agents and then wait for responses. After you get an agent, you then have to sit back and wait as he/she sends off queries to publishers. Then, when an editor shows interest, you have to wait for them to actually read it and pass it along to their colleagues. And for people who read books for a living, they sure do take forever to read your stuff. Take it from me. I’ve been there before with several publishers. Then, after your book is accepted for publication, I’ve read that it can take anywhere from six to twelve months before it appears in print.

Anyway, I think I just found the trick to surviving all this waiting without going crazy with impatience and self doubt while I’m waiting two, three, or four months for them to read a 200 page book.

The trick?

Planning ahead. No matter what stage you’re at, start researching and planning for the next stage as if it’s definitely going to happen. If you’re waiting for someone to edit your book, start researching agents. If you’ve sent your queries and are waiting for responses, then start researching agent contracts and what questions to ask your prospective agent before you sign.

Personally, I’m waiting to hear back from publishers so I’m planning the next phase. I’m researching what happens when a book gets accepted for publication and how I do my part for marketing. I’m building a website, coming up with a marketing plan, and writing my next book. I’ve found that planning ahead for the next stage is helping me to stay positive.

Stay Sane!

Writing can consume so much of you that you just want to curl into yourself and be like Silas Marner with his gold coins. You count your precious words, run your mind over them, polish them, count them again. A sort of obsessive compulsion takes over. So I’ve developed a few tricks to staying sane.

Exercise: I play tennis about four times a week. I could go to the gym, but I’m lazy, and any stint on the treadmill makes me feel punished. I don’t have the discipline to lift weights etc. But I’ll play tennis because it’s a game, not exercise.

Learning something new keeps the mind fresh and active. I’ve recently started taking belly dancing lessons. I laugh at myself as I try impossible feats like belly rolls and shimmies (Is that how they spell it?) Afterwards, I’m deliciously sore and feel invigorated and ready to tackle the manuscript.

Read! It’s always a good idea to keep up with your reading. Read a book in the genre you’re writing. Read another in a different genre. You’ll be inspired.

Nurture your relationships. No work is worth neglecting those you love. I now spend more time with family and call my friends. Loving others nurture your soul, so go for walks, go dancing, make love, have a glass of wine. And then write.

Any other ideas?
Bisi

Making Each Scene Count

The articles and books I read about writing usually relate to what I’m trying to achieve at any given time.  A few months ago, I was editing a Romantic Suspense novel and I asked myself what to keep and what to chuck.  In other words, it was time to be brutal.

As a writer, you know how easy it is to get stuck on bits of your writing that you feel a story can’t live without.

Taking out the sentences and paragraphs you feel are wonderfully written often lightens the prose, which makes for a better read.

Apart from taking out crutch words and unnecessary tidbits, I’m forced to look at each scene as a single unit.  I check for the following things:-

^^Does it have a snappy opening line?  One that will force the reader to carry on?

^^Does the middle live up to the beginning?  Or does the scene start to drag?

^^Is any new information revealed by the end of the scene?

^^Does my character and plot develop?

^^And at the end, do I leave on a note that will carry the reader forward to the next chapter?

The checklist above can’t be applied while editing for grammar nits. It’s too important to lump with anything else, which is why most writers edit each chapter several times.

We all know it’s impossible to check grammar, movement of characters, continuity and sensory details in one go.

The last step for me these days is to test the validity of each scene.  Does it need to be in there at all? If it does, are there extraneous bits I could stand to lose?

Sometimes I get all the excess material out and at other times, yet another round of trimming is required.

That’s when lean, fluent scenes emerge.

The Art of Layering

We all strive to get our work just perfectly so, to tell a good story with well-rounded characters and some kind of grip in the plot, which is to be commended, but don’t neglect adding details that will provide a “wow” factor.

Although it’s not for everyone—as with any given novel—, the music of Pink Floyd has that “wow” factor. At first, it sounds about as trippy as Strawberry Fields but if you let the words, strange chords and unusual sounds linger for a while, you’ll see it all contains shades of sorrow and joy, irony and societal satire and commentary that is difficult to appreciate at go one. It’s not drug music at all…it’s art. And many Breaking Benjamin songs are so rich with metaphor that every listener comes away with a different meaning like their song entitled Dance with the Devil.

It has nothing to do with the actual devil. It’s just a metaphor, which could mean giving your life away to debauchery while ignoring its destruction, a loss of life or love, the inability to save a friend, turning your back on responsibilities, drug addiction. I’ve heard commentators all over the web give a different meaning for this song. Kind of funny and cool all the same.

You can infuse, braid and paint multiple layers into your works to create greater texture: secrets for the setting/town or minor characters that are uncovered little by little, codes to be unlocked, dark humor, irony, satire, themes, multi-layered metaphors, mini plots that weave in and out of your main plot.

A pro at layering is Eric Wilson, author of Dark to Mortal Eyes and Jerusalem’s Undead Trilogy. He has character and prop connections in most of his books, where one minor character will be related to a character in another book or the mystery surrounding a relic in one novel is revealed in another. He also infuses his love for chess, Eastern Europe and Judaic history.

As long as the things you write flow in the story in a non-cumbersome way, it’s okay to weave in undercurrents and nods for things, tiny treasures to be unearthed by your keenest readers.

For instance, I am a Red Sox fan, so my main characters in Kings & Queens are also Red Sox fans. One of my character’s had a dog named Dewey (nn for Dwight Evans, for those who don’t know) and Carlton Fisk’s name pops up a few times (one of the best catchers ever). The two jersey numbers worn by Fisk during his career tie into the plot and I refer to Don Mattingly as being from the Evil Empire. Most readers will gloss over these details, but they’re there for savvy fans to find.

In the 80’s when Family Ties and Growing Pains were on air, Michael J. Fox and Kirk Cameron had an on-going competition with one another to see how many times they could spin in any given episode. Would any viewer even give the spinning a second thought? No. It’s a private joke between them. That’s funny and cool.

Don’t be afraid to build in those little extras. Deeper nuances, richer details and surprising angles and tie-ins will make your work much more resonating. For keen eyes and minds, your hidden jewels will make the read unforgettable.

~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.

Novel Sentences

A few weeks ago I was contacted by The Seattle Examiner and asked to write an article for the website about my writing process. That article was published a few days ago, and I’ve decided to include that here. Here is that article:

The afternoon ended in an explosion of thunder, a screech of bald tires on dry pavement, and a head-on collision on Route Forty-Four outside of Phoenix.

Fortunately, that is not a description of my last road trip. It’s an example of my writing process. I think all writers have their own peculiar writing techniques. I know one writer who badgers everyone he meets for title suggestions. When he hears a title that engages him, he creates a story to fit it. Other writers I know outline their entire book. They don’t even begin writing until they have every step of their journey mapped out. They know where every bend in the road is. They know all the rough spots, detours, and pot holes along their trip. I envy their organizational skills. Anyone who has ever visited my home knows that I lack that particular trait. I am a one-woman testament to the second law of thermodynamics. Everything is moving from a state of order to disorder. My desk alone proves that.

I have attempted to emulate my outlining friends in the past, but my stories ended up reading like outlines. Really bad outlines. I learned my lesson, and now I don’t even give a passing thought to being organized. I accept the fact that I am a mess and try to make the best of it. I also tend to limit visitors. (Quick confession: sometimes, after a book is completed, an agent will request an outline. I type one up, send it out, and hope I have given the appearance of being organized and responsible, but in reality, it is simply a summary of my finished manuscript. I am still the same wreck that I’ve always been.)

My true writing process is similar to my friend who creates stories from titles. I think of a first sentence and then the rest of the story follows from that. Within a few paragraphs, I have a general idea of who my characters are, what the plot is, and what is going on. But I mostly write down the story as it happens. I don’t like doing research, so I try to stick to topics that I have some familiarity with. If I am writing something that I do not have first-hand knowledge of, then I research, but I don’t do it until I reach the section of the story that actually needs to be studied. Then I stop the writing process and delve into research. Sometimes that takes quite a bit of time. Since this is not an activity that I enjoy, I frequently procrastinate during this time, and that drags out the completion of my book—sometimes by several months. Another thing that slows me down is burn out. Frequently, towards the end of a novel, I lose interest, take a break, and find it difficult to get going again. And sometimes, I just get stuck and don’t really know what happens next. It eventually becomes clear to me, and I start writing again.

There are many other drawbacks to my method of writing, as well. Sometimes I get toward the end of my manuscript and realize I need to add a chapter or two, rearrange the order of events, or scrap something entirely. My characters don’t always behave in ways that I expect them to, nor do what I’d hoped they would. They tend to take on a life and will of their own. For the most part, they run the show like a group of spoiled children, reducing my role to janitor—leaving me to scurry about cleaning up their mess and staying late to lock up the joint after they’ve all gone home for the night. Or in this case, the end of the book has been reached, and the last sentence on the final page has been penned.

Doralynn Kennedy
http://www.doralynn.net

Guest Post: Intriguing First Sentences

Please welcome
January’s Guest Blogger,
Chris Delyani.

SHARED THOUGHTS:

On these cold January nights, on the fifteen-minute walk from the train station to my house after work, I like to let my mind wander, shedding the stresses of the day. On good days I might think about a party I’d been to or a trip I’m planning to take; on bad days I might wonder about the economy or the mountain of laundry bursting out of my hamper. And then there are the days—good days, bad days, it doesn’t matter which—when I think about the opening sentences of my favorite novels.

Some nights I like to ponder the opening line of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” in which Austen introduces her heroine from a distance: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence, and had managed to live twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” I’ve always loved that word “seemed.” Emma Woodhouse doesn’t unite the best blessings of existence, she only seems to unite the best blessings of existence; and the distance Austen immediately sets up between us and Emma helps us see Emma’s faults more clearly as her story unfolds.

If I’m waiting for the light to change and have extra time to kill, I might compare the opening of “Emma” with the opening of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” Here I feel I’ve been dropped into the story, so close to the narrative I can only guess who’s speaking. The “that day” at the end of Brontë’s sentence, like the “seemed” in Austen’s sentence, is one of those clues I began to understand only after repeating it aloud to myself. Brontë could have written “there was no possibility of taking a walk” without harming the sentence’s grammar, but the “that day” lets me know the action Jane Eyre is describing has long past, on the exact day—almost the exact minute—her story begins. I liked “that day” so much that I wound up borrowing (okay, stealing) the phrase for the opening sentence of my own novel.

But my favorite first sentence to mull over on my walk from work, a first sentence that seems to beg to be mulled over (and over and over), comes from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Nine words, fourteen syllables—no sentence could be simpler in syntax and yet so complex in meaning.

As I walk past bus stops and Korean restaurants and the pink-painted candy store on my way home, I like to break apart Woolf’s sentence in my mind—it’s not hard, after all, since it’s only the nine words—and think of the ways Woolf could have written that sentence, but didn’t. (I could go on about the choice of character name for Mrs. Dalloway, patrician and poetic with its liquid double-“l” in the middle, but I’ll leave the fun of naming character names for another blog.)

For starters, Woolf could have introduced us to her main character in any number of ways:

“Clarissa Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

“Clarissa said she would buy the flowers herself.”

“She said she would buy the flowers herself.”

Or Woolf could have changed the sentence from indirect to direct dialogue:

“Mrs. Dalloway said, ‘I’ll buy the flowers myself.’”

Woolf could even have inverted the subject and the object:

“‘I’ll buy the flowers myself,’ Mrs. Dalloway said.”

Or she could have been more specific about the flowers:

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the roses herself.”

Or, finally, Woolf could have omitted the sentence’s last word:

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers.”

But for me, taking out the “herself” is the worst thing I can do to that opener. I love how “herself” draws the stress away from “buy the flowers” and deepens a story that has scarcely begun. Already, I’m asking myself: who is this Mrs. Dalloway, and if she doesn’t buy the flowers herself, who would buy them? Why do the flowers have to be bought in the first place? Even the “the” in front of “flowers” takes on a special meaning: they aren’t just any flowers, they are “the” flowers, flowers, apparently, that somebody has to buy. I know I’m in the hands of a great writer when even the pronouns and the definite articles draw me in.

Of course, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” is etched so indelibly into our common literary psyche that it’s hard to imagine life without it.

Not far from me is a bookstore called Mrs. Dalloway’s, with the first sentence stenciled into the wall above the bookshelves; I can’t imagine any of my rewrites achieving such iconic fame. For to change the opening sentence of Mrs. Dalloway by even a single word, I think, would have given us a different novel than the one Virginia Woolf gave us.

So if you’re staring in front of a cold, blank computer screen, having trouble coming up with that right first sentence, don’t worry—it probably won’t come to you until after your gazillionth draft, after your characters have sunk into your skin. That’s how I comfort myself, anyway, when I struggle with my own fiction on these dark January nights.

Have a favorite first sentence you like to chew over? Share it here or email me about it at cdelyani@gmail.com.

♦   ♦   ♦

ABOUT CHRIS:

Chris Delyani published his first novel, “The Love Thing,” in July 2009, and is feverishly working on a second. He lives in Oakland, California, with his husband Dan and his cat McGee. You can visit his website at www.chrisdelyani.com.

SYNOPSIS for The Love Thing:

Twenty-two-year old Greg DeAngelis moves to San Francisco from New York to escape his overbearing father, who’s pressuring him to go to law school, and his ex-boyfriend Matthew, who dumps him for an older, richer man. To make desperately needed money Greg temps at a law firm, where he blunders into the role of the firm’s official birthday cake maker, despite his utter lack of culinary skill. A lot of guys vie for the hero’s attention as he navigates the rough waters of office politics and single life in San Francisco, but only one of them can give him “the love thing.” Can he figure out which one, before it’s too late? This comic novel is about the importance of love and friendship, and of knowing who your true friends really are.

TRAILER for The Love Thing:

♦   ♦   ♦

Thanks, Chris, for some great food for thought and for illuminating the importance of first sentences.

Write With Passion

One of the keys to good writing is to write with passion. Passion is a gift. It makes readers follow your words and look for your name. So many people now write from the head and not the heart.

To get readers attention, you have to hook their attention.

In the cyncial world of now, people roll around in their apathy like a dog in crap and most of them are happy to be there. They don’t care, they aren’t happy, they aren’t sad. The buggers aren’t even angry. If you can’t get sad or mad then you need to lower the dose because the meds are working too well.

It’s okay to feel what you feel.

It’s okay to rant and laugh and scream a bit.

It’s okay to care.

When you care, your writing has bite. And that’s what a reader wants. They want to be interested. They want to care or laugh. Hell, they even want to be mad enough to call you an asshole. Writing should inspire something in your reader.

The writing might make them think about their life, it might make them giggle hysterically. Perhaps it makes them throw the book across the room and yell ‘idiot’ at the book cover.

A book with passion will always inspire something.

The worst thing you can do as a writer is write something that only inspires apathy.

How do you make your writing passionate?

Choose topics that hit your hot buttons. You know what your hot buttons are. Maybe it’s the teacher at school who refuses to follow your child’s IEP. Perhaps it’s the chick in the drive-thru that consistantly gives you the wrong order. Maybe it’s the humor in every situation that excites you.

Have a logical argument about health reform? Be passionate and clear and I’ll listen. Because passion is addictive. When you care as a writer, the reader starts to care as well.

But remember how I said passion is one key to good writing? The other key is editing. Write with your heart, edit with your head. Write your article or blog, let your heart spill itself all over the page. Then set it aside for a couple of hours.

Take a walk. Play with the dog. Cook dinner.

Then come back to your article and read it again. Use your brain to build in facts to back your argument. Make sure you’re being passionate but not doing a mindless rant. Okay, a mindless rant can be fun sometime, just make sure your idea isn’t lost in the energy.

If you can join fact with passion, then everyone will want to read what you write.

Now if I could just follow my own advice.