Write Aligned

After winning a bid at work recently, a company director congratulated me and my team for “working this one through to the keeper!” I don’t play a lot of sport, but even so I don’t know of any games where you want something to go to the keeper. This seemed like a good catalyst to write about mixed metaphors. Metaphors, visual imagery and idioms are important elements of fiction. Without them, we are stuck in the stark, white hospital room of completely literal descriptions. Wait… without them we are stuck in the stark, white place… we are stuck… without them our writing is very boring. But what happens when you drop two or more metaphors in close proximity? It’s inevitable that readers are going to combine them in their heads. This can have a variety of effects, both good and bad. As always, the important thing is whether the author gets the effect they were after. Incongruous Some mixed metaphors are just so incongruous, strange or contradictory that they make for a confusing

Someone in a writing group I'm in asked recently asked which one of these was correct: We were going to be alone during the ceremony. This would be my only chance to throw myself on his mercy. We were going to be alone during the ceremony. That would be my only chance to throw myself on his mercy. I thought it was an interesting question, so I took a bit of time replying. You might find this interesting too, as I haven't seen any other articles discussing this difference. In general, "this" is for things close to you, and "that" is for things further away from you. Or another way, "this" is something that you hold (in your hand or more figuratively) and "that" is something you point to. This applies to temporal distance too, e.g. "1983, now that was a great year" "I love 2017 - this is a really great year" "I can't wait until I'm living in 2037. That will be so much fun". When you a

It’s fun creating a map for your fictional world. But making a map without a basic knowledge of geography can make it look like your world runs mostly on magic and unicorn farts. Assuming your physics work pretty much the same as Earth physics, here are some tips on how to make your rivers look realistic. Mountains, plains and forests can show up in all sorts of places, but rivers are the things that people seem to stuff up the most. 1. Rivers have to flow from a high point (mountains or hills) down to a low point. In the mountains, they are usually made up from lots of little rivers (tributaries) feeding into other tributaries, then joining and joining until they make a large river. When they join, they usually come together at a shallow angle, pointing downhill. Occasionally the source of a river may be a mountain spring, but usually it’s just lots of surface water from rain or melting snow collecting into little streams which keep joining up. 2. Rivers coming d

Anecdotal evidence suggest that they are. Here’s what I managed to do today while thinking about writing: Headed to an exercise class at lunchtime but left my water bottle at work. Headed to the showers afterwards but left my towel in my car. Headed to my car to get my towel but left my security pass back in the office. Headed back to the showers but left my change of socks and jocks in my car. It makes sense though, right? Part of our mind is always in another world (or worlds), necessarily subtracting from the amount of attention we can pay to the world around us. Though sometimes our attention to this world can drop below the acceptable minimum. J Has this been your experience? What silly things have you done while thinking about writing? G. K. Chesterton was notoriously absent-minded, though he never saw it that way. I’ll leave you with this thought of his: “I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”

I need this. You might too. :)

This is a chart I created to explain the various tenses, aspects and moods in English. I have seen a large number of these around, but all of them were only subsets of this chart. This one seeks to combine as many as practical. I hope you find it useful. :) (Note - some avid redditors have pointed out a couple of errors related to the subjunctive tense. I will be fixing these shortly). For the PDF, click here .

As someone who loves board games, I don't know why this hasn't occurred to me earlier. But if you're struggling to pull a plot together, it might be helpful to think of your story as a board game. Sure, it might be an unusual board game. The players might start and finish at different times and have wildly different moves, resources, motivations and goals. But as long as those goals are in conflict (which is essential to a story) then your characters are basically all playing a game. Start with Turn 1, Player 1. Become that player. What do you want? What moves are you going to make towards that? Then, become Player 2. What moves will they make? Are they aware of the other players yet? Repeat this for all players. Then move on to Turn 2. Which players are now aware of other players? Which players will have to adapt their moves based on what the other players have done? Which players are working together or against each other? Are any new players joining the game, or ha

How nice would it be if we could somehow transfer the story directly from our heads into a computer file? Maybe one day the technology will get there. Who knows...

In quantum physics (i.e. down on the level of electronics and sub-atomic particles), most things are described as “probability wave functions” rather than discrete blobs of matter. An electron isn’t just “there” at point X, it exists as a cloud of probabilities centred on point X. And that’s not just because we can’t tell accurately enough where it is, it’s actually smeared out in space like a wave, and has a chance of being anywhere within that cloud. This is how one electron can somehow go through two slits in a piece of metal simultaneously and interfere with itself like ocean waves. However, when you set up a detector to measure which slot the electron is going through, the wave-function collapses and the electron is observed going through only one slit, with no interference pattern. (For more information, see Young’s Double-Slit Experiment ). “What on earth does this have to do with writing a novel?” I can hear you crying. But I promise that we will get there. I once remarke