Advice from the Masters: Flynn Meaney

Feb 1, 2017 | Better Writing

It’s been half a century since I could be considered a young adult. So I haven’t read a lot of YA fiction lately, which means that I haven’t read any of Flynn Meaney’s work. But that’s OK, because I can still mine her wisdom about writing. In this case I found a nugget in a superb interview Meaney did for The Writer, a magazine that I read for the first time before she was born. Her advice may be especially important for people who write business books.

“If you can come up with some elaborate descriptive phrase or musical combination of words no one else could possibly come up with, congratulations. But that doesn’t mean you should use it. The readers need to see what you want them to see and feeling what you want them to feel, so if the simplest words have the biggest emotional impact, use them.”

Want more? Check out the complete list of Advice from the Masters posts

If you want even more writing advice from writers, check out Jon Winokur’s blog, “AdvicetoWriters.”