by Aaron Gansky @ADGansky Hey, remember cassette tapes? Good times. Back in the day, mixed-tapes were all the rage. What better way to say “I love you,” than a tape filled with your loved one’s favorite tunes? When I was in high-school, the mixed-tape was a required prerequisite to asking…

by Aaron Gansky @ADGansky If you’ve been writing long, you’ve heard all the evils of using the passive voice. It sneaks into our prose without permission, and disguises itself among our active sentences like a malevolent chameleon. But unless you teach English classes in all your spare time, there’s a…

@ADGansky Often, as writers, we tend to take the path of least resistance. We’ll throw in a tired, worn-out cliché because it’s easier than actually thinking of an original description. The result is a lot of the same stories with the same characters and the same “plot-twists.” Unfortunately, nothing makes…

@ADGansky Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages. –Kurt Vonnegut Aside from keeping…

@ADGansky Write to please just one person. –Kurt Vonnegut Vonnegut is not alone in his call for laser-focused literature. Stephen King, in his book On Writing discusses a similar idea. He mentions that every writer has an ideal reader, and should hold that ideal reader in their mind as they’re…

@ADGansky Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they’re made of.–Kurt Vonnegut No one likes to betray a friend, but we sometimes feel that way when we make bad things happen to…