If your writing feels clogged or flat, check for unneeded articles and prepositions, and set them adrift on the sea of life.

The 5-W sentence is one of the writer's best tools, good for starting a narrative, keeping you going when you’re stuck, and getting you back on track when you lose your way.

Convince and persuade are different, though the dictionary says they’re interchangeable.

Start with this line by Dionne Brand, from Inventory, a book of poems, then freewrite for 10 minutes:“One year she sat at the television weeping, no reason”

Freewrite for 10 minutes about a scar or scars: your own or someone else’s.

To get involved with involved is to set foot on a slippery slope.

The editors of Geist turn down a dozen or more submissions of prose writing every week, most often because the piece is more descriptive than narrative: it consists of facts and/or descriptions and/or backstory in preparation for a story, but it is not a story. The prose that lasts is the good story, well told.