Writing Tools

Writing Tools: The Blog

Welcome to Writing Tools: The Blog, where you'll find new tools three times each week. To subscribe to this feed via RSS, click here. You can also sign up to receive Roy's posts as an e-mail newsletter if you click here.

My friends, students, and colleagues know that one of my favorite writing tools is "Get the name of the dog." That strategy works as a reminder to reporters to record the telling detail, and to writers to climb down the ladder of abstraction (see tool #22) and be specific. In addition, poets since Homer (a good dog name) have been fascinated with the names of things.

I guess you could say that "Get the name of the dog" has become my mantra.

But what about the name of the butterfly?

A young writer named Creighton Welch just taught me how to take the name game to a new level. I worked with Creighton on a story he had written as part of our young journalists summer program here at Poynter. He had visited a local nature park and discovered that it had 56 species of butterflies. "Do you have the 56 names for the different kinds of butterflies?" I asked. "I've got 55," he said.

Photo by Larry Larsen

Roy's Writing Tools A Q&A with Roy Peter Clark about his new project, Writing Tools: The Blog.

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What followed was a delightful conversation in which we wondered how many of the names he could sneak into his story, and which ones he'd choose. Our favorites included the Hackberry Emperor, the Gulf Fritillary, the Great Purple Hairstreak, the Cassius Blue, and the Three Spotted Skipper, not to mention that old favorite, the Tiger Swallowtail.

Get the name of the dog, the cat, the bird, and, yes, the butterfly.

Welcome to Writing Tools: The Book and the Blog. Back in 2004, I celebrated my 25th year at The Poynter Institute by writing 50 short essays, each one describing an important writing strategy. Readers from across the globe helped me perfect these tools and encouraged me to develop them into a handy, inexpensive book. The result is "Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer," which is about to be published by Little, Brown and Co. My editor, Tracy Behar, has inspired me to expand these strategies for the widest possible audience; and the publisher is pricing the hardback at $19.99 (Amazon is offering an early discount -- you can find it here), making it affordable for students and professionals alike.

Work on the book is completed, but not my search for effective writing tools, or for interesting examples of good writing. Enter Writing Tools: The Blog. It will make available, at no charge, the "Quick List" of Writing Tools, exactly as it appears in the book. Then, three times a week, I'll offer a new example, a new tool, or a variation on one of the original 50.

As with all blogs, this one will be a work in progress. As you helped me sharpen the 50 tools, you'll have a chance to join the conversation, to offer your own favorite strategies, and to ask questions about the craft. (Click here to send me an e-mail with your suggestions.) Just for fun, my alter ego, Dr. Ink, will weigh in on occasion with his/her bombastic point of view.

In the beginning was the word, then came the book, then came the blog.