Category: Quotes, Words, & Phrases

April 21, 2016

A Story Is Like a Horse

Even if you get it to stop, it might not end well. If the story needs to go a specific direction that badly, forcing it in another serves little but your own pride and stubbornness. One of the best habits for a writer to learn is to be sensitive to where the story you’ve started is headed. If you want a specific...

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April 13, 2016

The Worm’s-eye Point of View

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April 11, 2016

3 Words So Commonly Used Incorrectly That Most People Just Don’t Care

Sadly, there are far more than three. You know it. I know it. Let us remove our hats, bow our heads, and have a moment of silence for all the poor words so commonly used incorrectly. Ok. Moment of silence over. I picked these three words because they’ve been misused so much that the false definition is commonly accepted as...

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April 8, 2016

A Beginner’s List of English Expressions from French

Quite a bit of English came from French. Oh, most of it happened a long, long time ago – which means that many of the words and phrases changed spelling and/or pronunciation way before our time. It happened so long ago, in fact, that manny of us don’t even realize that things we say were once (or still are) French. Which...

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April 4, 2016

Never Let the Truth Get in the Way of a Good Story

If you Google this proverb, you’ll come up with plenty of sites that attribute it to Mark Twain (Goodreads, for one); however, I haven’t been able to find any reliable proof that he actually said it. And while I’d like to be able to say that it’s his quote (there’s something emotionally satisfying about quoting Mark Twain), I like to...

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March 27, 2016

Ideas Are Like Easter Eggs

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March 22, 2016

What Should Not Be Forgotten

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March 14, 2016

Even Authors Pick Apart People’s Plots: Terry Pratchett & Dr. Who

For all that we’re liable to be on the receiving end, writers aren’t always the nicest about pointing out other people’s plot holes. In reality, writers can be really harsh critics (kind of like how teachers are generally awful students, and doctors make bad patients). Since writers know more about writing (we assume), they can find more flaws. Of course,...

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March 10, 2016

10 Two-Dollar Words from Disney Movies

A lot of people think that writing for kids means using only easy words. Well, not so for Disney. In fact, I’d say that some Disney movies can go a long way to increase a child’s vocabulary (or an adult’s, for that matter). I should know because I just looked through the quotes from 17 Disney movies (just the quotes,...

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March 9, 2016

Two-Dollar Words

The phrase “two dollar word”* or “ten dollar word” (or “four dollar word” or “four bits word,” depending on where you’re from and how old you are) can have a couple of different connotations depending on how it’s used. The most common use is to mock the person who just spoke and imply that they are being pretentious, condescending, snooty, or just plain prissy:...

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