{"id":1095,"date":"2017-02-26T15:38:33","date_gmt":"2017-02-26T21:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/?p=1095"},"modified":"2017-02-26T15:42:13","modified_gmt":"2017-02-26T21:42:13","slug":"writing-tips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/?p=1095","title":{"rendered":"Writing Tips"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t felt very good this weekend. The symptoms are of a fairly mild cold. Given that there is a rather virulent strain of flu running rampant in the area I feel like I have little room to complain. None-the-less, I find that every time I try to do something, my head pounds, my throat hurts, and I get winded.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday, I went to a meeting of the Huntsville Downtown Writers&#8217; Group. We were treated to a marvelous program on the importance of a good editor and how to choose one given by Ann Marie Martin. In addition to learning about editing and editors, I also learned some important things that will help improve my writing. I thought I&#8217;d share a couple of them with you.<\/p>\n<p>First, you&#8217;ve got to capture your reader&#8217;s interest on the first page. If you can manage to do it with your title, you&#8217;re ahead of the game. Reading is an investment of time. No one wants to spend their time reading a boring story. If you don&#8217;t convince them that you have a good story for them on the first page, they won&#8217;t turn it to see if the rest of the story is any better.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing that I learned is that writing with constraints, for example a limited number of words or a deadline for finishing the piece, can help sharpen the focus of your writing. It was as I listened to this advice that I realized that forcing myself to write a blog post every day was part of my writing apprenticeship. I decided that I should put a length limit\u00a0on my\u00a0posts to help me learn to distill what I have to say.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Sweet dreams, don\u2019t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t felt very good this weekend. The symptoms are of a fairly mild cold. Given that there is a rather virulent strain of flu running rampant in the area I feel like I have little room to complain. None-the-less, I find that every time I try to do something, my head pounds, my throat &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/?p=1095\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Writing Tips&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1095"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1098,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions\/1098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kellie.wildroseandbriar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}