Top 10 Posts – Seventh Edition

 Uphill Writing surpassed 700 posts yesterday.  So what, you say?  Fair question. 

It is true that hitting this number, or any future number, isn’t that big of a deal—not in the overall scheme of things.  Still, if you’ve blogged for any length of time you know what a passionate business it is, and what kind of battles one must fight, on a daily basis, to keep it going, the number might have some small significance.

My blogging guru, Dr. Bill Belew suggested that a Tipping Point of about 1000 posts and about 1 year is where you begin to see real growth in a blog.  He has the numbers and comparative charts to prove it. 

I’ve seen a steady growth in readership of UhW over the past months, and can point to clear times when each new plateau was reached.  For a fairly new blogger, this is pretty exciting.

So, now, without further ado, the Top 10 of the last 100 posts:

1. Is It Possible to Tell a Story Without Fantasy?  Can we keep our beliefs and prejudices out of our writing?  Should we even try?
2. And Now Comes the Heart Part.  Crafted emotional impact is a good thing, but what about those times that your emotions jump in and stir things up unbidden?
3. The Character’s Journey: Where Will It End?  I suggest that some of the most satisfying stories we read are those I think of as “Journey” stories.  Whether the journey is physical distance, or emotional and personal growth, the changing of the protagonist is gold.
4. Side-Stepping the Obvious: Making Dialogue Flow.  As with movies and television, dialogue in books cannot be real.  Real is boring, repetitive, slangy, and often just uninteresting.  It must, however, give the feeling of being real.
5. The Things That You Have to Do In Order to Do the Things You Need to Do…  Ever find yourself being sucked down into a whirlpool of trivia?  You know the feeling, the “I can’t write with a cluttered desk syndrome”, and its many cousins.
6. The Best Way to Keep One’s Word is to Not Give it.    We all make promises.  We promise pages to our editors, we promise to find a way to bathe the cat that doesn’t require bandages, we promise… we promise the moon.  But in writing we are held to a responsibility higher still.
7. Does Writing Ever Get Any Easier?  No, but here is the reason that’s not so bad.
8. Stringing Your Reader Along.  Let’s talk about foreshadowing, one of the most potent tools in the writer’s bag of tricks.
9. Take Him Away He’s Got Nothing To Say.  If your personal philosophies leak out into your story, is that a good thing?
10. Language: The Thriving Skill of Miscommunication.  Ever been amazed that your friend or spouse totally misunderstands something spoken in the language you have both shared for decades?

Well, gang.  That’s it for this edition of the Top 10.  I hope to see you here for the Eighth edition.  After all, it’s only 100 posts away.

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