Alex's Epics of India Blog

I really liked the "Advice to Writers" page. There was a lot of short, quippy, useful tips for me as a writer, and I hope to reference this page more in the future. I really liked the advice "Stop Dancing and Just Go for a Walk." This post mostly talked about eliminating fluff from stylistic parts of my writing, mostly with commas (which I use a lot). I liked the way that this little post presented the information. It described exactly the problem it was hoping to help fix -- a problem I have in my writing -- with it being too flowery a lot of the time. I tend to add a Falkneresque of Woolf-like feeling to the style of my writing, and I allow sentences to go on and on and on without forseeable end. A more Hemingway kind of sparsity of targeted language might be better, and I think that is what the post means by 'walking.' (Though I'm sure that Hemingway would argue that his writing definitely dances, just in its own way). How I feel when...

"Why Writers Should Know About Monsters Before They Write a Word" was a really interesting article. It was interesting to see the relation to Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's source material, showing that most of his ideas of monsters were derived from Scandinavian myth. This is a really universal example - everyone knows about Lord of the Rings - so it worked really well to prove the author's point, that when creating something grotesque like a monster, there should be source material with which the reader has a passing familiarity, so that the reader will not be so thrown off by the monstrousness of the writer's creation. Also, the specific distinctions between devils and demons was really interesting. I had no idea that the two could be confused, and that there are specific attributed which separate one type of hell-spawn from another. Their specific attributes - especially the specificity that the devils carry that demons don't - intrigued me. T...