Tag: author

Punctuation [semi] Outdone

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#DailyFixEA

Lynne Truss on punctuation:

“But colons and semicolons — well, they are in a different league, my dear! They give such lift! Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP, for hours if necessary, UP, like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots . . . you stop.

But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes — that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity — well, they are the colons and semicolons.”

Truss’s book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, is an excellent resource for writers of all kinds. You can find it here.

Cliché Not After My Own Heart

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Strong writing is a unique feature of capable authors. It is not merely words strung together, copied and pasted, from society’s lingo.

Here are clichés to avoid…like the plague:

[found on clichesite.com]
  • A rose by any other name would smell as sweet
  • Abandon ship
  • About face
  • Above board
  • Absence makes the heart grow fonder
  • Absolute power corrupts absolutely
  • Ace in the hole
  • Ace up his sleeve
  • Achilles heel
  • Acid test
  • Acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree, The
  • Actions speak louder than words
  • After my own heart
  • Ah, to be young and foolish…
  • Airing dirty laundry
  • All bent out of shape
  • All bets are off
  • All dressed up and nowhere to go
  • All ears
  • All for one, and one for all
  • All hands on deck
  • All hands to the pump
  • All heck (hell) breaks loose
  • All in a day’s work
  • All in due time
  • All over the map
  • All paled in comparison
  • All talk and no action
  • All that glitters is not gold
  • All that jazz
  • All the bits and pieces

 

To see the complete list of clichés from clichesite.com, click here.

[found on http://clichesite.com/alpha_list.asp?which=lett+1]

 

Featured Writing Addict: Ingris Gonzalez

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Ingris Gonzalez

 

WYANA-Front copyIngris Gonzalez was born in 1979 in El Salvador—a poor country, which was hit with a terrible war in 1980-1981. Her family escaped the war, and immigrated to New York City. She was raised in Union City, New Jersey.

At the young age of seven—her dad, consumed with drugs and alcohol, abandoned his family. Ingris began to write, dedicating journals to her dad and opening her heart to how exactly she felt, day by day, after he left. Ten years passed, and she met her husband and married at the age of seventeen. She and her husband, Chris Gonzalez, moved to Arizona.

Happily married to Chris, Ingris has been an X-ray technologist for many years at County Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. Today, they have two amazing kids: thirteen-year-old Lindsey, and eight-year-old Joshua. As a family, they have grown a big passion to help orphans in Latin America; this has become their reason for their ministry, Alto Precio [High Price] Ministries. Through sales of their music and books, they provide meals to 150 orphans in Juarez, Mexico.

What is Ingris’s Genre?

Christian, Nonfiction, Inspirational

What is  Ingris’s Inspiration?

“Since my dad abandoned us at an early age, I would escape my pain in books and novels as a kid. In my teenage years, I started writing journals, which I dedicated to my dad—I thought one day he would come back, but he never did. Sharing my life story with other women in pain made me feel I had to share all of me with people who are, at this precise moment, living what I lived before.”

Ingris didn’t just write a book; she is dedicating her life—traveling around the world, giving marriage conferences and women’s conferences. She is also reaching female teenagers who are in need of an inspirational word of freedom. Being bi-lingual, she has the opportunity to reach many different ages, cultures, and genres.

What are Ingris’s books about?

Woman, You Are Not Alone
WYANA-Front
 “Ingris has just completed her first book in order to reach other women who are hurting at this moment. The book Woman, You Are Not Alone is a nonfiction book filled with true-life experiences lived by Ingris. Not only does she share her life with everyone, but she also teaches how to be free from hurt, pain, and disappointments from our past. With every book purchase, Ingris dedicates a percentage to feed orphans in Juarez, Mexico.“
 

 

 

| Amazon | AltoPrecio.com | Facebook | Email |

 

| To book a conference or event: 480.262.5200 |

 

Tell Ingris you heard about her on editingaddict.com!

 

 

Direct [not long-winded] Narrative

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Hopper, Gale, Foote & Griffith on narrative:

 

“In narrating an incident the writer should begin with the circumstances in which it occurred and the events immediately preceding it. Do not begin with unnecessary explanations or remote and inconsequential events.

An indirect or long-winded approach bores the reader and destroys the impact of the story.

Furthermore, you may get lost in a maze of inconsequential details or exhaust yourself before you have narrated the climax of your story.

Suppose Susan is telling how she and Steve were nearly drowned when they rowed into the ship’s channel at Gloucester, Massachusetts, and their boat was swamped by a passing freighter.

This story should probably begin with their taking the boat out. The writer can then concentrate on how, unthinkingly, they rowed into the channel and on the ensuing events together with their emotional reactions to them. The story should not begin with an explanation of why the couple decided to vacation in Gloucester. Nor is it necessary to say that on the preceding evening a guest at their hotel suggested the excursion, or even that they were eager to get out on the water because they had been kept indoors for three days by a northeaster.”

 

Hopper, Gale, Foote, and Griffith‘s book, Essentials of English, is an excellent resource for writers of all kinds. You can find it here.

Odd Habits? Nah, Writer

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“In the end, I am quite normal. I don’t have odd habits. I don’t dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don’t talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer’s block, all those things that we hear about writers.”

— Jose Saramago

 

Paradox of Humanity

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“The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.”

— Tim O’Brien