Jill Nelson’s “Rivet Your Readers with Deep Point of View” (DPOV)

Recommended reading

I got Rivet Your Readers with Deep Point of View at the suggestion of my writing coach, Rich Marcello (and he’s great. I’ve learned things I didn’t know I didn’t know. It don’t get much better than that!). He told me I already did most of what Jill Nelson explained in the book and that I might pick up a few incidentals, which I did.

I read the book last week (while traveling) as I write this and have already caught myself a few times with her “gotchas”.

The only real flaw I had with her book was the exercises. I felt they could have been better explained and/or better examples given. More than once the reader is invited to rewrite a sentence to incorporate lesson elements. Excellent! Except the given solutions (and she does give solutions to the exercises. Thanks for that!) often incorporate information that was no where in the original sentence and the solution becomes several sentences long. The added content not being part of the original problem sentence threw me.

I understood her suggested solutions but found myself saying “Where did she get that?” or “Where did that come from?” more than once. A little frustrating (for me) and it didn’t stop me from highlighting many items and learning.

I do suggest it for writers/authors wanting to improve their craft.

Writers’ Groups – Critiques

emPHAsis and sylLAbles

(picking up from where I left off in Writers’ Groups – Introduction…)

My core reason for all the socializing that’s part of any writers’ group is to learn, improve, increase.

Learning, improving and increasing comes from critiquing others’ work and having my own work critiqued, and critiquing is a learned skill (my opinion, that).

Critiques are not Reviews
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Labor Relations

Pesky characters, always makin’ a ruckus…

Interesting experience a few weeks back. I got into a serious argument with some characters in The Augmented Man. The argument was so serious that all writing stopped. Not only writing on The Augmented Man, also work on Ritchie and Phyl, Gable Smiled and a host of others.

Fantasy characters threatened to strike in support of their literary fiction brothers and sisters. Characters still in development refused to cross picket lines in support of their already written brethren and sistren.

There was talk of locking up my keyboard until things got resolved.

But if you lock up the keyboard we’ll never reach an agreement, I explained.

Phyl said, “You have two paragraphs, Mister. Get writing.”
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