Category Archives for Writing
What I Learned About Writing From Reading Stephen King
My senior year of high school, I left my English teacher’s Christmas Party with Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot in my hands and an exciting new strain of the flu setting up shop somewhere in my respiratory system.
As a game (and our winter break reading assignment), we each wrote the title of our favorite book on a scrap of paper and placed it in a bowl, and then we passed the bowl around. It was literary roulette. And now, thanks to a sick classmate, I was about to spend my winter break reading.
Throughout that feverish Christmas holiday, I walked my first lap in the multiverse that would eventually introduce me to thinnies, low men, twinners, ka and ka-tet, and the Twelve Guardians of the Beams—in other words, the wonky fantasy lexicon that has contributed to some readers calling King a master of literature, and others a peddler of low art.
King is a divisive author. Some hang on his every word, while others fall in league with a more critical crowd. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days in polite society are numbered,” King wrote in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
The Power of Pen and Paper: Should You Do More of Your Writing By Hand?
I spend most of my workday at the computer (and a fair amount of my leisure time on a tablet or phone). I expect the same might be true for you, too.
It hasn’t always been this way. As a young teen, I wrote a lot by hand. All my schoolwork was done in exercise books or on paper, with an occasional typed-up assignment. But gradually, I started writing more and more straight onto the computer.
These days, far more of my words are typed than handwritten. But when I put pen to paper, there’s something different about my writing and even my thinking. I’m able to take risks and be more vulnerable—because I know I won’t be publishing the words as written. I also find that I can focus more deeply, without all the distractions of the web a single click away.
6 Secrets to Writing Guest Posts That Editors Love
You’ve probably heard that your business and brand stand to gain a lot when you write guest posts. But maybe you’re at the point where it feels like editors have ganged up to reject all your guest-post pitches.
Getting your guest posts published doesn’t have to be so difficult.
Let’s look at those rejections from another angle: Most likely, you’ll discover that these editors are sending you a message. To understand that message, just take a step back and review everything you’ve been doing, strategically.
Let’s start at the beginning. What exactly is a guest post?
How To Write Content Both Search Engines and Humans Will Love
One of the biggest challenges that professional writers face is the struggle between writing content that is good enough to rank on search engines and sounds natural for their human readers to grasp.
The prospect of search engine optimization (SEO) has evolved constantly with time. Do people still believe in and practice the “Content Is King” principle or is it now just a bygone tactic in its slow demise?