Tag: featured
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We Need More Hope-Filled Media
Whenever anyone asks me what kinds of movies and shows I like, I tend to just give the vague umbrella answer of “fun and feel-good,” occasionally followed up with, “if I wanted to be depressed, I’d just watch the news.” This usually returns a mixed bag of recommendations, since of course different things make different…
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What Happened to Competence Porn?
In 2009, Leverage writer John Rogers wrote in a blog post about how viewers enjoyed “watching competent people banter and plan,” something his team had come to refer to as “competence porn.” This phenomenon, now named, has loosely cropped up throughout all forms of media over the years, from Odysseus escaping the Cyclops to Sherlock…
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Writing Realistic Dialogue: How Real is Too Real?
If you struggle with writing dialogue, you’re definitely not alone. As a big part of characterization, dialogue can be the difference between whether a reader loves or hates your characters. Dialogue that’s not broken up by action can be confusing, but too many dialogue tags can bog down your writing. Plus, people tend to talk…
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“Because” Is a Coordinating Conjunction. Fight Me.
Let’s go back to middle school English class for a moment. What is a conjunction? Conjunctions are parts of speech that join two words or phrases together. There are three types of conjunctions: coordinating, subordinating, and correlative. Coordinating conjunctions join two grammatically equal words or phrases. They’re usually remembered by the acronym FANBOYS: for, and,…
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The Reality of ‘Show, Don’t Tell’
If you ask someone what the most important rule of writing is, chances are they’ll tell you to show, don’t tell. There are articles all over the internet of varying degrees of accuracy explaining what exactly this means and how to put it into practice in your own writing. To save you the trouble of…
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So It’s Your First Time Doing NaNoWriMo
Congratulations! You’ve taken the first big step toward writing a novel: you started. You’ve got an idea burning in the back of your brain, you’ve got characters itching to leap into existence, you’ve got a setting just waiting to be brought to life. The only thing standing between you and your grand vision is fifty…
The Lit Nerds 