Writing Craft

What is WYSIWYG

If you know WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get, you’ll remember that it promised to put the same thing on paper that you saw on the screen. That is, whatever your text looked like on the computer’s LCD, that’s what it’d look like on paper.

You may know these adages.

• It’s what you do, not what you say.
• Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
• Seek and ye shall find.
• Actions speak louder than words.
• Practice makes perfect.
• A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
• A thing begun is half done.
• Beggars can’t be choosers.
• Better to wear out than to rust out.

Fiction writers have a similar one.

Several times a week, the Central Phoenix Writers Workshop meets to critique and commiserate.

There’s lots of them, of course: punctuation, word choice, active versus passive voice…

Since 1999, this annual event has helped motivate authors, including lots of wannabes like myself, complete book-length 50,000 word pieces in the month of November. With a daily goal of 1,500 words and a website for participants to commit to and then track their daily progress, NaNoWriMo provides the daily carrot, or in my case what worked for me-the whip-to get it done.

My writing is afflicted with a horrible disease.

Here’s the process I’ll be trying out as I edit the nearly 500 pages of double-spaced text in my first draft.

Third Person Point-of-View

A lot of books are told by a narrator.

When I started Serpent’s Smile with the “one chapter per week” goal, my writing process included a rewrite and an edit before each post. That was how I blogged - or at least how I tried to blog.

In the Facebook search bar, try “YourCity writers workshop”, substituting nearby city/area names. You’ll want to try several and note (pen and paper) the interesting ones for followup. In my case, I found four critique groups for writers.