Episodes
-
Juliet and Jon are going on a summer vacation. They’ll be back in September.
The post Vacation Announcement appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
Sometimes you mean what you say. Sometimes you don’t. Jon and Juliet discuss messages and metamessages and some of the ideas from Deborah Tannen’s That’s Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships. (Amazon link) They recite a few lines from Jules Feiffer’s play Grown Ups. Jake: Look, I don’t care if it’s important or not, […]
The post Messages and Metamessages appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
Missing episodes?
-
From our twitter account: This show is our answer. If you have a question, tweet us. Email us. Send us a voice-memo. The simile examples came from this site.
The post Like What To Do With Too Many Likes appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
Juliet and Jon talk about some recent research into Gender Verbs. What they are. What they aren’t. How to have some fun with them. From the Variance Explained blog, David Robinson examined Gender and verbs across 100,000 stories. We riffed on the following graph from David’s blog:
The post Gender Verbs appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
Juliet and Jon fire up the time machine, (or is it the nostalgia machine?) and each read from one of their favorite books from their childhood. Our selections couldn’t have been more different. For Juliet, it’s from ‘Old Man Kangaroo’ from Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. He was grey and he was woolly, and his pride […]
The post Delicious Books from Childhood appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
Loglines are usually associated with TV and movies but as an ever-resourceful writer, but they can be quite useful for novelists. Juliet and Jon define, dissect, and discuss loglines. Jon shares one that he’s working on and with for a current writing project. David Macinnis Gill is an associate professor of English education at the […]
The post Longline of My Dreams appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
Naming characters. Should be easy. Bob. Alice. Ted. And Alice. Done. Jon and Juliet discuss naming characters. Dos. Do nots. And they consider an interesting post by J Warren Piece, who covers such naming topics as: A) Alliteration B) The Plain w/the Bold C) Syllabic Echo D) Rolling off the Tongue E) Ending Strong F) […]
The post It’s Not a Cemetery. It’s a Garden of Names. appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
A warning: We say several profane words. Including tabernacle! Jon and Juliet talk about Benjamin K. Bergen’s book What the F? What Swearing Reveals about Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. In our Profanity or Amateurfanity? show we talked about some concepts from Mr. Bergen’s book. We expand upon that here. And we highly recommend the book. Follow this link to Amazon.
The post What the F? appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
She got off the phone with just a single goodbye. The security guard put up a hell of a fight. After being knocked out cold in each the last five chapters, the protagonist feels pretty good. Juliet and Jon talk about those things that movies and books get wrong—spurred on by several choice examples from a […]
The post What’s Always Wrong With Books (And Movies)? appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
Sometimes a writer will repeat a comfortable device… Again… And again… And again… What is happening and why? Juliet and Jon examine a trap that Jon recently fell into—the dreaded ellipsis. Why would that happen? And what to look out for when writing… Book mentioned in the show (Amazon Links. Click and help support the […]
The post Hi. I’m a writer. I have an ellipsis problem… appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
Almost as old as time itself is the question: Should I outline my novel or just wing it? Jon and Juliet suggest that the answer to this ancient mystery is: Yes! Jon discusses his experience trying an outlining system described in Libby Hawker’s Take Off Your Pants!: Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing. Amazon link. […]
The post To Outline or Not to Outline appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
The other day, Jon saw an okay article about character building, which listed such things as: 1 Where does your character live? 2 Where is your character from? 3 How old is your character? 4 What is your character called? etc. These are fine to start. But what can add that extra spark? Jon’s list […]
The post Five Things to Make Your Characters Come ALIVE! appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
Juliet and Jon play a word game based on the fantastic internet writing resource that is Jonathan Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the largest historical dictionary of English slang. Written by Jonathon Green over 17 years from 1993, it reached the printed page in 2010 in a three-volume set containing nearly […]
The post Jonathan Green’s Dictionary of Slang appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
We address a question and a comment from listeners. 1. From listener Christian—I’d be interested in hearing what you guys think of Heilein’s rules for writing (only 5, not 20). Not so much the first two, but the last three. http://www.goodreads.com/…/421667-heinlein-s-rules-for… Rule One: You Must Write Rule Two: Finish What Your Start Rule Three: You Must […]
The post Our Feedback to the Feedback appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
We talked about movies and TV. We talked about how Jon finished his third novel. We mentioned that it took ten years. We talked about the difference rewriting makes. We talked about the business of writing. We talked about how late in the process major details are figured out. We talked about what it takes to […]
The post Ten Years To Finish A Book appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
After our three show marathon about Stephen King’s writing advice, we discuss giving writing advice. And then tangents take over. So many tangents…
The post Thoughts About Advice appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
This is the final, part three, of our shows on Stephen King’s writing advice. We consider these points: Find the whole article here: 8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. “Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second to least […]
The post Stephen King’s 20 Writing Rules Reconsidered – Part 3 appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
This is part two of our giant three-part show on Stephen King’s writing advice. We consider these points: Find the whole article here: 14. Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what the writer is doing may seem. You can’t aim a book like […]
The post Stephen King’s 20 Writing Rules Reconsidered – Part 2 appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
We open up a can of arrogance on Stephen King’s 20 Writing Rules. Sometimes we like his advice… Sometimes we don’t… As always, we discuss why and why not. Find the whole article here: 1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When […]
The post Stephen King’s 20 Writing Rules Reconsidered – Part 1 appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
-
Need a bad guy for your novel? No problem. Grab yourself a crazy, hell-raising, face-mask-wearing, serial killer psychopath. Perfect. Right? Maybe not. For many reasons. Juliet and Jon discuss what psychopaths probably really are and why we write about them. Podcasts that Jon mentioned in the show: Recently from This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/587/the-perils-of-intimacy?act=0#play From Radio Lab […]
The post Truth, Lies, And Psychopaths appeared first on The Seventh Draft |.
- Show more
