Using real places in your writing

The setting is a key foundation of any story. Without it, your characters are engaging with a plot in an amorphous location. Sometimes, ignoring the setting can lead to dialogue-heavy writing (or “talking head” syndrome). A simple way to ground your story in reality is to use actual places in your writing. I’ve talked about how traveling to these locations helps add the needed realism to stories based on the real world. However, I also understand that not everyone has the time and money to go to a specific spot in a big city that they don’t live in. It’s certainly easy to use locations close to where you live, but not every story you write will likely be set in an easily accessible spot. Thoroughly researching these places you haven’t been to with Google Maps and travel guides is a simple way to overcome this limitation. Convey the sensation of “being there” Ideally, though, visiting the location you want to use in...
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Expectations and a Reviewer’s Rubric

When I first started my website, www.benjamin-m-weilert.com, I knew I wanted it to be a repository of reviews for all the books I’ve read and all the movies I’ve seen. I have some of these reviews scattered across the web, but I wanted a single location where all of them could reside. A single place where I could control these reviews. Now that my website is almost a year-and-a-half old, I have accumulated over 250 reviews on it. These reviews range from nights at the Colorado Springs Philharmonic to audiobooks to movies to books received from authors and/or publishers. As most of my reviews, I provide a “star” rating to help visitors to my site determine if the piece of media is worth their time. Early on, I based most of my ratings on an intuitive “hunch” of what I felt the work deserved. This scale (from 0.0 to 5.0) is mostly subjective and, while this is still largely the case,...
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