writing

Preposterous Prepositions

I’m a fan of Sir Winston Churchill and his acidic quips. I was delighted to find a new Churchillianism as I was perusing The Cassell Guide to Common Errors in English by Harry Blamires. I wasn’t looking for Churchill but engaging in some grammatical self-improvement to pass the two extra hours spent at gymnastics on a Friday evening. My eldest daughter has developed “talent” requiring extra coaching. Only one word to describe that – “Bugger”!

Prepositions are are words such as “of”, “for”, “by”, “with”, “before”, and “after” and are used with nouns and pronouns to provide some grammatical context. These are the most common words in the English language and without them we would sound something akin to Tarzan leaping through the grammatical jungle in search of Jane.
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The Writing Process

There is a process to everything we do. When carpenters are ready to frame a house, they’ve already gone through important preparations. When a cook is in the kitchen, she’s already done her homework. Writing is the same as everything else.

Even though great writers might seem to skip a few steps or rearrange the order of steps when they are writing their masterpieces, it doesn’t mean that they haven’t done the preparations. Great writers are just so used to the steps that they’ve probably done a few of them in their heads.

When a writer begins to write a book without an outline, the organization of his book is in his head. I often do that when I know what I’m writing and I just want to get to it. Especially in this day and age where I have a computer and a word processor, the writing process is made so much easier.

Prewriting

Prewriting is the first step in any writing where the writer is trying to come up with ideas for what to write about. A good writer who is already familiar with the writing process might sit down in front of the computer and just start writing. I think of ideas all the time and when I’m ready to write, I’m ready to just roll with it.

But if you need to come up with ideas, there are plenty of ways. Do a little freewriting I wrote about in an earlier piece. Stimulate your brain with news or music. Look through your journals and pull something out that you’re interested in doing.
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Using Analogies, Similes and Metaphors

Analogies, similes and metaphors work because they allow a writer to present a complex idea by reference to something that a reader is already likely to know.

Plato wrote a work about 2,500 years ago called “Allegory of the Cave” in which prisoners are duped into believing that shadows cast on a wall are in fact reality. The allegory in this instance is that Plato used this picture of a cave with duped prisoners as the basis for explaining a series of philosophical concepts dealing with our perception of reality and what we consider to be real. Hollywood took hold of this and created The Matrix as a modern day retelling of the tale but without imparting any real meaning by use of analogy.

The difference between Plato’s work and The Matrix is an excellent example of good and bad use of analogy.

Plato used analogy sparingly and ensured that the concepts he was attempting to impart to his readers formed the core of his content.

The Matrix uses analogy until it is done to death and leaves the viewer confused so it’s just as well the special effects were pretty good along with Trinity and her latex covered backside.
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Producing Information Products – eBooks

I finally completed the dating eBook, proofed, formatted and delivered with client approval so now I just have to wait for the payment to arrive and then I can get my car out of the garage and back on the road.

Ahhh…genteel poverty and the life of a scribbler!

Honestly, seeing the 76 page long eBook with someone else’s name on it did give me pangs of something I know not what.

I wrote that blasted thing !

What the experience has done is make me look a lot more closely at producing eBooks with my name on them and I have one in the can already. Now I’m just formatting the beast and looking at where and how I can get some money on the creation.

Before I go to the e-Press however, I’ve been taking a good hard look at what I’ve produced.

The book deals with …writing for profit.

Shock! Horror! – not much of a surprise there then 😉

From my research, the best sellers for eBook sales statistics are dominated by the “How to” genre. It appears that demonstrating how to solve a problem is the key to generating eBook sales. To this end,the tome need not be several hundred pages long, in fact many of the best sellers are less than 50 pages of double spaced, font size 12 pieces of work that probably run to less than 10,000 words in length. For a writer like myself that is a days worth of work including the research!
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Planning a Document

Anyone who travels around a lot knows that planning contributes towards making the trip a success. Certainly, the unplanned jaunts and routes taken in a trip come as side-kicks or bonuses— in both ways, making your trip ripe in experience. However, without the bone structure of planning you will fall face-down-in-the-earth.

The foundations of any document are the planning of its “rhetorical strategy”. To get one’s point across to an array of audiences, as wide as possible, is the main focus of most document writers. One needs to be clear in purpose of the message to be conveyed through the project. When the purpose of the writing becomes clear, this becomes easily possible. Some of the major points involved in creating a successful document presentation include the following:
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Cooking for Writers: A Recipe for a Great Paper

Writing for a writer becomes a habitual process where the flow comes and just gets rolling. Pages and pages full of words course from our brains and through our hands in no time at all. It’s like giving a knife to a cook. The meal doesn’t take long at all to be ready.

Staying with the cooking analogy, someone who doesn’t know how to cook stands dumbfounded looking at ingredients and wondering what to do with them all. The same happens with someone who isn’t very familiar with the writing process. Thoughts are streaming through your brain, but you can’t get them out on the page. You can’t get them started.

Writing shouldn’t be as difficult as most people think. If you can talk to your friends, you can write. You’ve learned enough to start what you want to say, say what you want to say and sometimes you even get a chance to wrap up what you want to say. All you have to learn now is how to get it down on paper.

Just Begin

What stops most people from writing is getting started. How to begin is the question. Don’t look for some dramatic way to begin your document whether it’s an essay for college or an article for a magazine. Just begin.

What is the point of your paper? Start with a sentence that pinpoints the answer to that question and then go for it. Write the first paragraph with supporting sentences. Write your paper with supporting paragraphs and then, wrap it up in a nice little conclusion. Now, you can go back to the beginning and go for a more impressive, dramatic introduction if you want.
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