Writing Shift

Read. Learn. Write.

A friendly warning, a gentle reminder: What you'll find here is advice and encouragement. What you won't find are silver bullets. When I first got into writing I searched for something that would put me over the top. I read a dozen books on the craft and scoured ten dozen websites, searching for a one-size-fits-all (an everything-included-here) source of magical knowledge. I came up with just one thing. It doesn't matter what we know, but how hard we're willing to work.

That said, the more you read on the craft of writing, the more redundant information you will come across, until one day you wake up and everything you see you've seen before, and everything you read serves only as a reminder. A reminder to do the only thing you have in your power to do. To write.

Don't spend your life collecting grammar books and books with greedy titles like “Ten Tips to the Perfect Story Idea!” A few of the best books on the subject of writing will do, as the rest will only say—in a slightly different way—the same things you've heard before. Sooner than later you must sit down and write...and write, and write, and write. Knowledge goes only so far, it's the doing that takes you the rest of the way.

So, please, study the information in this site, and study what the great writers of our generation and of the past have had to say on the craft. But don't strive to know everything. The only worthy knowledge is that stuff you use every day, and if you're not using it, it's not worth collecting.

The first link in the Writing Shift Workshop is for the burgeoning writer. It contains a handful of helpful tips and two essays to help you get warmed up for what's to come.

Craft can be divided into two sides, each valuable to the life of a story from the story's first idea to the finished product on bookstore shelves. Craft encompasses many things. It can be language, grammar and punctuation, structure and style. Craft can also be the business side of writing, the planning and execution of story from beginning to end that will best suit the readers' wants and needs. Craft is everything to do with writing, because everything writing involves can be studied and perfected. It is the writer's methods and it is the writer's madness. It is how the job gets done.

I've divided craft into tangibles and intangibles. The measurable, definable, and concrete versus the ever-changing, mysterious, and abstract. A difference seen in the books we read, and also in the lives and habits of successful authors.

Tangibles are used to write the story. They are what the reader can see, what makes a story interesting or bland, and what a professor or student of literature can study and what a critic can critique. They breathe life into words and separate good writing from bad.

Intangibles are what no one sees, but what drives an author to write and sell a story. Intangibles are the marks of professionalism that can't be easily measured. They are a mix of values, habits, and abilities that can greatly influence a writer and help her stand out in a very crowded industry.