Based on a true story… You are working as a technical writer on a project that has gone horribly and quite predictably wrong. The original sizing for the project was for five technical writers. Your project was given three. One of the three was fired and the other one quit. You are now all that’s
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By Chad Morelli Right now, in a small cubicle on the second floor of the city hall building in your town, there is a web content editor who is frustrated, angry, and tremendously stressed. And why is our poor friend having such a bad day? Why has he alone been subjected to the terrible anxiety
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Here are some questions you should ask yourself when you are describing things for a story. You don’t need to describe every element of a story to a minute level of detail, but you should consider what will make your descriptions better, and what can send you off course. What would the characters notice? Describing
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Most good stories are very heavily influenced by their settings. Consider this simple story setup. A young couple has just gotten married. At the reception, the bridesmaid reveals that she and the best man had drunken fling the night before the wedding. As they head off on their honeymoon together, the bride and the groom
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Is this the End? Every story has to end. The most important thing that has to happen before a story ends is that the central conflict of the story has to be settled. The protagonist wins. The protagonist loses. The protagonist realizes that she has both won and lost. Whatever the case, the crisis is
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The Hero is Defined by the Villain The NBC show Heroes has a lot of problems. It never quite lives up to its potential for a number of reasons. There is one thing I love about the show though. I love Sylar. Sylar is the bad guy. Occasionally you get the feeling that he would
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Editing a poem is in many ways like editing any other work of writing. The central goal is to eliminate any errors you have made, to improve on words and passages that aren’t quite as good as they could be, and to work to make the poem hold together as a single unit. You would
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In the earlier days of this site, I used to host a fast fiction exhibition. Every week I would post a prompt and people could write a very short story in response to the prompt. It was a lot of fun. A story told in 100 or 200 words starts to read a lot like
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Ending a poem can be difficult. People feel the need to end on a powerful note. They want to sum up the poem. They want everything that lead up to that final line to feel perfect, and think that this is only possible with the perfect final line. That is a lot of pressure to
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Pain is personal. Pain is powerful. Pain is not original. Accepting the risk of hyperbole, I can say that all poets go through a pain period. All people, and thus all poets, suffer. You may be mistreated by a parent, rejected by a lover, betrayed by a friend or touched by death. These things happen,
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