Here’s one I wrote now, the top 5 Ingredients of compelling writing

It takes a little more than pure inspiration to write that killer content. Although the idea is the kernel to any great literary dish, you should always have on hand the following ingredients to lift your words to the writer’s equivalent of haute cuisine. You may find that taking these ideas with more than a pinch of salt is just what you need.  But you shouldn’t assume that you need all these ingredients all the time, mix and match; experiment. There are many more ingredients you could use, but these are my top 5:

  1. Nearness – The reader can be drawn in with any geographical or experiential situation that they can identify with, try and create the ‘I’ve been there’ factor.
  2. Consequence – Try to make the content deal with matters that effect; create consequence in what you write.
  3. Human interest – Go on you know you want to, go all out for the cute vote, the shaggy dog story at the end of the news keeps you hanging on for the weather report. Alternatively the opposite is also true, a report on the cost to life of any disaster can be a compelling read.
  4. Drama – Action and intensity… if you’re writing a story, this can be quite a good hook.
  5. Oddity – Pique that mind, interest that soul. Let eyes pour over your words, washing them into the bowl that awaits like open mouth – sometimes being weird works, trust me, I’m an editor.

Remember these are ingredients, it is up to you how you use and mix them, or even add a few more of your own.

This post is also being entered into the top 5 competition at the wonderful ProBlogger site, you can read more about that here.

Stephen King ‘On Writing’ quotes from 37 Signals

Those nice peeps over at Signal vs. Noise, the blog from 37signals who brought us some wonderful Web 2.0 tools, have posted a nice list of quotes by Stephen King. All the quotes are nice and helpful for writers of all sorts of material.

What is even better is that the comments list below contains even more gems for writers, this is blogging and community led synergy at its best. So if you want some writing tips from one of the most successful writers of modern times follow the link below.

Stephen King quotes

How to improve your vocabulary

I went to school with a very clever chap. He was always revising, and always getting good grades. When it came to his English exam he did all the usual study or grammar and reading of the set texts. He also spent several minutes each day reading the dictionary. At the time I thought this extreme, but he got a much better grade at English than I did.

Creative writing involves words. The more words we know, the more creative we can be. I am not advocating using words that no one knows, or are so obscure the reader hasn’t any idea what you are saying. Having a large vocabulary and one that is also growing is an essential tool for a writer.

One way of improving your vocabulary is to sign up for the wonderful Dictionary.com’s ‘word of the day’. You can subscribe to the RSS feed and you’ll get a new word each day. I have been using this for a while now. Each day I get a word and if I don’t know it, or I am unsure of its meaning, I take a moment or two to learn it. It may be too late to improve my English grade but I live in hope that my writing will become more colourful.

Word of the Day

Writing tips over at Copyblogger

There is a great post at Copyblogger that will come in useful for writers everywhere, 5 tips for writing well as proposed by Ernest Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway’s top 5 tips for writing well.

The positive point stands out for me. Often as I write I find myself camparing things in this manner.