Writing Help
Looking for a few extra tips and tricks or craft hints? You’ve found YeahWrite’s Writing Help archive. Below, you’ll see a collection of the posts we think you’ll find helpful. Besides our monthly Nonfiction Know-How and Poetry Slams, we’ve included posts from past workshops, guest authors, classes, and the times one or another of our editors added some in-depth knowledge during a routine weekly post. Be sure to check out our favorite post: the one that defines the “so what.” Whether you write fiction, nonfiction, or correspondence, your reader should never be left asking… so what? We’ve also collected our best of the best posts about constructive criticism in one place, because writing help is also about helping each other write. Good luck, and happy writing!
Leggo my Echo
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The Echo myth might be one of my least favorite stories of Greek mythology, but it lends its name to one of my new favorite poetry forms. In the myth, the nymph Echo falls in love with the worthless manbaby Narcissus who basically is...
Home is where the stories are
It's pretty much That Time of Year again. Yeah, you guessed it: the season of family holidays. When the biggest thing on your mind is how your family is driving you absolutely freakin' nuts and you can't think of anything else to blog about but you swore that with...
From intent to intensity
No $#!7, there I was: writing about the most horrifying moment of my life. I wrote, and I wrote. I sure did write the heck out of that story, which was a story about the most horrifying moment of my life. I was so scared in that moment. That's why I wrote about it. It...
Nine… Eight…. Seven….
45 is the magic number for this month's poetry slam. 45 syllables, that is: the 45 syllables, in decreasing lines, of the form known as nonet. I know this is the point where I usually get bogged down in some big long history lesson, but the fact is that there just...
Quitters are Winners
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]For this month's nonfiction knowhow we're going to focus on two conflicting aphorisms. The first is "winners never quit; quitters never win" and the second is "quit while you're ahead." I'm not talking about quitting writing...
8+5=Triolet
I know it doesn't feel like it today, when the Real Feel Index says that I'm sitting in a room that's literally halfway to the boiling point of water, but summer is winding down and coming to an end. Kids are headed back to school, and for some of us (not me, thanks,...
Super challenge 1 – round one recap
When I ask our community what they love about yeah write, the first thing that everyone says is - can you guess? It's not "the challenge" or "the competition" or "the bump in my blog stats." No. It's "the feedback." So here I am again to give you the feedback on round...
One asefru, two isefra, three isefra, four
[vc_row][vc_column width="1/4"][vc_single_image image="29470"][/vc_column][vc_column width="3/4"][vc_column_text]The Amazigh (known historically as Berber) people have been around for a long time. Don't believe me? Check out this dude on my left from the tomb of Seti...
Play it again, Sam
I spend a whole lot of time talking about editing. Edit your work. OH MY GOD PLEASE @#$@ING EDIT YOUR WORK. But what does that even mean, once you've run spellcheck and decided that you don't want to write at the broken fifth-grade grammar level that is Microsoft's...
Tears, idle tears!
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tennyson wrote, but really, we all know what tears mean, right? Sadness. So sad. So very very sad. The saddest. Have reached sadception. Pining for the fjords. Something. What we might not know is that "tears" are a...
Here we go rondeau the mulberry bush
So who had fun with the bop last month? Didn’t quite get the poem you were hoping for? Want to try it again? Well, we’re upping the difficulty level a little this month with the rondeau. Like the bop, the rondeau is essentially a “song” form of poetry, so I hope...
Five-minute warning
As an editor, I spend a whole lot of time talking about how to fix up writing you already have. But what do you do when the words don't come? For this month's nonfiction know-how (thanks, Cyn!) I want to talk about finding ideas when you don't think you...
Let’s go to the bop!
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Poetry is basically history, amirite? It's not, though. As tempting as it is to think that all the poetic forms were invented ages ago by dead people, poetry is very much alive and changing. Last month's poetry slam here at yeah...
If it doesn’t work for William Shatner, it won’t work for you
When I was sitting down to write this post, I thought of some ideas I could use to introduce the subject. When I think of phrasing, I tend to think in terms of music. Because I wasn't sure of a nonmusical way to describe phrasing, I asked a friend. She thought for a...
Welcome to the 5-7-5
If you grew up in the USA, the odds are pretty good that at some point you were required to write a haiku in class. Your teacher probably sat you all down and gave you a little lecture on the history and culture of Japan that may or may not have been accurate at all,...