By Laura Drake Have you ever heard this Indian Parable?  Six blind men try to determine what an elephant looks like by feeling different parts of its body. The one at the tail says an elephant is like a rope; the one at a leg says it’s like a pipe, the one at the […]

By Sharla Rae I preach Like With Like to my critique partners all the time and once in a while, they remind me to practice what I preach. So what do I mean by like with like? It’s not as easy to explain on paper as it is to point out the mistake in a […]

by Sharla Rae In Laura Drake’s recent blog My Editing Peeves, here at WITS, she points out dialogue tags. I have to agree that too many “saids” on a page or even in a chapter are annoying. Sure there are other tags like snarled, whispered, interjected, cried etc. But again, they stand out if overused. Included […]

Sharla Rae  For the writer who enjoys history, researching is often the best part of writing a historical novel. Even so, deciding where to start can be mind-boggling.  Why Research? So Where Does the Research Start? To keep things simple, think of researching as the construction of a house from the ground up.  The Foundation: […]