I am not yet that good a writer that I can tell others how to do it well. There are others that do the job much better than I could, anyway. But I'd like to share what I've learned with you, anyway.

There are, from what I can understand, three parts to writing anything. First is the research and/or plotting - figuring out what you want to say. The next part is the actual writing - saying what you want to say. The last part is the hardest. Editing is the art of taking "what you want to say" and telling it when to shut up.

I have been collecting a variety of ways to improve my talents as a writer, and list some ideas for practices and stories. I've also designed worksheets for article, character and story generation. I have a simpler version of the story plotting that works well for book reports, especially for younger children. There is a more elaborate character sheet, the character biography, that I've included as a PDF file. It's borrowed from The Eclectic Writer. If you prefer, I can send you any of these worksheets as PDF articles for easier printing.

I don't do many of them, but I have done a few drabbles, stories of exactly 100 words, not including the title. They can be fun - and bloody frustrating!

"Finding the Write Words" is a whimsy piece that I did as a writing exercise: "What to Write When You Can't Think of Anything".

My writing notes are my scribblings and thoughts on the text "On Writing Well" by William Zissner.

Peg