All opinions expressed in the blog are solely mine. Blame no one else.
"Win every day," at home, at school, on the court. You probably owe summer reading reports. Get after it.
Write better. Overcome the tyranny of the blank page and the misery of Anne Lamott's "sh*tty" first drafts. Get something down and then revise.
The 2006 Melrose girls basketball team had six seniors. All made the honor roll. That's winning.
Consider these possibilities:
1. Use strong verbs. She hastened, sped, or raced...not she ran.
2. Dispense with adverbs. (Stephen King).
3. "Do the work..." remember, "Writing is easy, all you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." (Ernest Hemingway)
4. Know that you have a 'creative' and 'critical' voice. (Salman Rushdie)
5. Commit to sharing "the best available version of the truth." (Bob Woodward)
6. Advance the story. Keep it moving.
7. Remember "Chekhov's Gun." Use it or lose it.
8. "Kill your darlings." Maybe it's a great story or anecdote. That doesn't mean it belongs in your narrative. Comedians invest their career in shaving syllables.
9. Complexity and cruel vocabulary don't always mean better.
“He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.” (Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea)
10. If uncertain about how our writing sounds, read it aloud. That's how it sounds.
Study how to write better.
This is what great writing looks like: pic.twitter.com/8oZPCM1fE7
— Scholarship for PhD (@ScholarshipfPhd) July 7, 2024
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