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Blogging tips, Food for Thought, tvaraj, WordPress, Writers, Writing

I Kill about 60% of My Darlings Before Publishing

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Myself . By T.V. Antony Raj

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blogging-tips

I edit what I write several times before I hit the “Publish” button.

On many occasions I leave my darlings aside for a fortnight or so; and then I read them, cut, append, read, juggle sentences and paragraphs, juxtapose, add, drop, umpteen times in no specific order until satisfied to a certain extent. In most cases I publish only about 60% of what I originally typed.

In her post titled “Kill Your Darlings” W. Michelle says:

Being a good writer means knowing how to edit: taking what you’ve written and stripping out the dulling distractions so your ideas shine. It’s not always easy, but it is necessary.

She quotes American writer and Nobel Prize laureate, William Faulkner: “In writing, you must kill your darlings.”

This is Michelle’s advice to bloggers:

  • Today — whenever you’re reading this — start a new post. Write until you’ve said everything you want to say, then save your draft — but don’t publish.
  • Tomorrow, open the post and check the word count (hint: it appears at the bottom of the editing box). Edit your post down by 10%, then save it and forget it again.
  • Repeat on two more days, until you’ve done three days of editing.
  • After three days of editing, hit “Publish.”

If your original draft was 1,000 words, the piece you ultimately publish should be around 730; if you started with 500, you’ll end up with 365 or so. If you’re a flash fiction writer who starts with 50, you’ll need to get yourself down to 36. (If you have a bolt of searing editorial insight and want to cut it down more than 10% on any day, feel free.) Whether you’re a long-form or short-form blogger, learning to wield your red pen ruthlessly will improve your writing.

A fellow blogger and poet Tom Balistreri commented to Michelle’s post:

After I write I go back and remove all my typos.
Then I go back and correct my sentence structure.
Then I correct my grammar.
Then I throw out anything that’s frivolous or doesn’t make sense.
At that point I have a blank page.

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Food for Thought, Post A Day 2013, tvaraj, WordPress, Writers, Writing

An Invitation: Write for ‘Impressions’

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Myself . By T.V. Antony Raj

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blogging

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Do you have something interesting to share with our readers? Then, be our guest.

You can write for Impressions as a guest writer even if you are a budding or seasoned writer.

Rules for submission of articles:

  • We wish to publish only unique and impressive articles written for ‘Impressions.’ The content should be your own original material – not duplicated, copied or plagiarized.
  • Your article should be between 500 and 1000 words in length.
  • Each submitted article should have at least one image relevant to the subject.
  • We do not guarantee publication of the article submitted by you. After scrutinising your article, we will let you know you whether we accept it for publication in ‘Impressions‘ or not .
  • We do not pay for accepted and published submissions. What you gain would be your exposure as a writer to our readers.
  • After your article is published in this site, you are free to publish the same elsewhere but with due recognition given to ‘Impressions” as having published it first.
  • After the acceptance for publication, we reserve the right to edit, format and modify, if necessary, and we will remove any inappropriate link before posting on this site.
  • Please do not submit articles that hurt religious beliefs of others or pornography.
  • Since comments do not necessarily reflect the views of this site, we reserve the right to edit or drop comments on your published articles.
  • We accept articles written with Microsoft Notepad or Word document format., jpg or png images, and video URLs from YouTube.

Please send your submissions to: tvaraj@gmail.com

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Food for Thought, Inspirations, Post A Day 2013, This is Life, Writers

The Unheard Cries of A Misplaced Apostrophe by Felix O’Shea

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Posted on January 18, 2013

Poor little apostrophe. He knows his place, and more importantly, he knows when he’s not in it. Some, or all, will say that it isn’t really too important, and that as long as you get the gist of what is meant, then the grammatical semantics of the written word can probably fall by the wayside. However, if the boat of proper grammar truly is sinking, then I would rather let the weight of a million neglected semi-colons and brackets pull me down to the dreary depths of the abyss, than abandon ship and take refuge upon the misplaced and miserable apostrophe that hangs lifeless between the O and the S in the word: photo’s, or cling to safety upon the second f in the word of.

Now in writing this, I just want to assure anyone reading that I am not trying to seem patronising, nor am I pretending to be an expert; I can assure you that I’m not! I do, on occasion, get quite baffled with so many of the finer and seemingly more insignificant points of english grammar: a possessive of a plural, apostrophes on names that already end in ‘s‘, and so on, but what I’m trying to speak in favour of is the feeling that you needn’t be wrong, it doesn’t take that much effort to look it up and, let’s be honest, abbreviating and misspelling words in text messages really doesn’t save that much time!

Also, since I mentioned saving time, I may as well have a quick rant about how utterly, utterly stupid it is to replace a few letters with a number, or a word with a letter. I will of course concede that great is indeed two characters longer than gr8, and that if someone wrote b4 in a certain context, I would be able to deduce that they meant before; and I dare say that if ever I read “U R L8!”, I would probably be able to extract the meaning of that as well, albeit amidst a flurry of rage; but are we really in such a hurry all the time that we just can’t spare the fraction of a second lost by writing you’re instead of ure? It’s trying to look cool, because people think proper English isn’t. It’s the grammatical equivalent of wearing sunglasses at night.

There are a lot of aspects of our fine language that can baffle some, for instance the eternal battle between then and than (simple answer: then is chronological; than is comparitive. E.g. I grabbed the chicken nugget that was bigger than all the rest, and then I ate it.), and I understand that it is an effort to remember it all, but it simply pains me to see people who lack the linguistic skills to convey their points; and it makes me sad, because I know that joy that it brings me to properly convey my own.

Always remember, a well placed apostrophe is a happy apostrophe; and you’re never too busy to write a legible text message.

Repost of The Unheard Cries of A Misplaced Apostrophe

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Today “Impressions” Has Trumped 200,000 Views

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Myself . By T.V. Antony Raj

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Impressions Trumped 200,000 views

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I am deeply indebted to my readers, for today, I have surpassed 200,000 views since I posted my first article “Flight from Chennai to Washington” on January 12, 2012. The WordPress stats show views only from February 2012, whereas I started posting from mid January.

In January, 2012, I posted only four articles. However, from February 3rd onwards, I posted at least one article each day. So far, I have published 447 articles, including this one.

I had only a total of 779 views in February 2012, a meager 28 views per day. The number of views gradually increased each month. For the past 23 days in December, I have 25,120 views at an average of 1,135 views per day, up to the time of uploading (3:00 AM EST) this thank-you note.

Thank You for Visiting

Please do come again!

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