The Anxious Author

 Every author dreams of writing the next great novel. We want to write a story that stays with the reader long after it's over. We want it to crawl into their skin, seep into their bones, and completely penetrate their being, leaving their soul acheing for more and their mind blown wide open. We want to destroy our readers. All of us crave to see a five-star review pop up on our pages saying, "This book utterly wrecked me", but writing them is difficult.  As a writer, you cannot fully predict how your work will affect your reader. Sure, you have a general idea and you put a lot of work into picking the language you think will cause your reader to feel what you want them to, but ultimately what the reader feels isn't up to you. Readers will feel differently about books because of their personal lives. That's why we have trigger warnings and banned books. As a reader, in life, you will read many books- hundreds of books. Out of those hundreds, you will five-star rat...

     Whether you call it the A-Team, Varsity, or the Championship League there is always a group of people that are the ones called in when a job absolutely needs to be done right the first time around. In writing, the A-Team isn't made up of a crazy pilot, a big man with a fear of airplanes, or an absolute planning genius. It's comprised of elements that are necessary for the construction of good sentences. There has been some debate about whether there are 6, 8, or 9 members of this team, but when I was studying linguistics and English literature I was taught there were 8.     Speech, whether written or spoken, is comprised of 8 elements; Nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. In order to have a rich story with vivid imagery, all components must be accounted for. If you only had interjections it would feel like you were perpetually yelling at your reader. If you don't use pronouns it's hard to tell character...