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Friday Jul 22, 2005

Why Only Nine Lives?

ctwoman.jpgHow do you get the most possible incarnations from a piece? Don't just expand it into different variations: good trimming from the original can transform one big article into several smaller ones. Find some advice here (scroll down about halfway.) Some specifics include (especially if you're a writer of many, many hats):

You've already sold the short story. Perhaps you can expand it into a novel with the introduction of more characters and subplots. Alternatively, you might shorten it into a work of flash fiction. Could it be reduced to a few lines and turned into a poem?

Polish up your précis. Examine each word and see how the piece
reads without it. The same discipline should be applied to all your
writing.

Romantic fiction might be turned into a verse for a greetings card. If you've devised a witty plot, condense it into a joke for submission to something like Readers Digest.

"Cross-pollinate" by writing for two similar publications simultaneously. I offered online publication A an expanded version of an article I'd had published by print publication B and offered B an abridged version of an article published by A. Both were accepted within hours of my e-mailing them.


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