Download Color 2018 Calendar

Printable 2018 Quarterly Calendar

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Happy New Year!

Near the end of 2015, I made a post about time management, which included free downloads to help you get organized for the new year, including a Gantt Chart Excel template and a printable blank quarterly calendar.

Plan Several Months at Once with a Quarterly Calendar

I’ve been using this quarterly calendar since 2015 as a family planner, color-coding events and appointments for each family member. We can see the whole year at a glance, and I use it daily! It also works really well for planning out projects. You could use highlighters to create Gantt Charts on your calendar.

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How to Rewrite Filtering Language

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Twitter is abuzz right now about agent responses to filtering.

What is filtering?

Filtering language distances the reader from an experience by filtering it through another character. Removing the filter allows the reader to experience firsthand rather than secondhand.

If you read, “Abraham Lincoln saw snowflakes out the window,” you’re probably picturing a window with snowflakes falling down, the view slightly obstructed by the president’s trademark stovepipe hat. But if you read, “Abraham Lincoln went to the window. Snowflakes were falling and sticking to the glass,” you see Mr. President going to the window, and then you see what he is seeing, for yourself. The first example had filtering. The second did not have filtering.

Keep reading for more types of constructions some readers might find bothersome. Click “View Original Post” and skip to the very bottom for a list of overused words you can refer to while revising.

Lara's avatarLara Willard

overused-words

If you spend some time in writer critique circles, I’m sure you’ve heard the well-intended advice to delete words “that” or “was” from your writing. I’m here to clarify when you should, and when you SHOULDN’T, delete these words.

Once you’ve read the lesson, I’ve got a master list of commonly overused words for you to refer to while revising.

Delete “that”

Sometimes a sentence needs the word “that” in order to be read correctly. For example:

He knew from the way I carried myself and the name tag I had been
wearing my father is mayor.

The sentence above reads like a run-on without the word “that.” It reads better like this:

He knew from the way I carried myself and the name tag I had been
wearing that my father is mayor.

Don’t delete “that” from sentences which use a “from” or “by” to describe how a person learns…

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Tony Stark’s Motivation and Vices

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Following the superhero theme from last month’s posts on Batman and Harvey Dent, I wanted to revisit fear and motivation with Tony Stark—A.K.A. Iron Man—in a quick character study.

This is a man of many vices, but Tony Stark’s cardinal sin is sloth. He is afraid of failure, so he doesn’t apply himself. His goal is to be “safe” and comfortable. Some people might say he’s afraid of losing more people (like Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark is a billionaire orphan), so he wants to be in control (greed).

But he doesn’t actively try to be in control.

He wants Pepper to take over the business so he can tinker in his basement.

Tony is afraid of committing to her, and he’s afraid of committing to others, which is why his coming out and saying “I am Iron Man” is the conclusion to his first arc. He’s finally committing himself, and he’s committing himself to the entire nation.

See how you can use the “seven deadly sins” as inspiration for character motivation in this post from the archives…

Lara's avatarLara Willard

Welcome to Fiction Friday! We are currently in the middle of the Character Series. Last week I posted the Character Worksheets and included a little schpiel on the Cardinal Sins (Seven Deadly Sins). Today I’m going to go into each with a little more detail to illustrate how they can be used as a way to view character motivations. Why the Cardinal Sins? No, I’m not trying to prognosticate here. Two reasons I like this method of summarizing motivations: 1) as a part of popular culture, the idea of the seven sins is familiar to many people, both religious and wholly secular. 2) It’s a reminder that no character is a saint. Few things are more yawn-inducing than a character that is perfectly perfect.

As long as you consider the motivations of your characters, and as long as their actions come about because of what motivates them on the inside,

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