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ByJustin Cox As one of the four people behind The Writing Cooperative, I receive a lot of pitches. Besides the two-dozen submissions received daily through our submission process, another dozen arrive unsolicited via email. As writers, we want our words in front of as many eyes as possible. This requires pitching publications and growing our bylines. So…
ByJustin Cox Despite graduating college with a business degree, several of my friends were in film school, which led to me being part of multiple student films. Along the way, I discovered that writers can glean a lot of advice from the filmmaking process. Pre-Production: Loglines When creating a film, writing the script is not the first…
ByJustin Cox One, two, three, four, five… Everybody in the car so come on let’s ride. Mambo №5 These are the familiar lyrics to Lou Bega’s version of Mambo №5, released in 1999. While the song may be catchy, the title doesn’t fit the grammar rule for writing numbers. On the surface, writing with numbers is a…
ByJustin Cox Bob Dorough wrote “Three Is A Magic Number” for the first episode of Schoolhouse Rock in 1973. The song is a point personified. Everything points to three being the magic number. The past and the present and the futureThe beginning and the middle and the endThe heart and the brain and the body Three is…
ByJustin Cox In 2017, as part of the Writing Cooperative’s challenge, I vowed to publish something once a week. In the end, I published over seventy stories. My writing game was on fire. 2018 has been different. Publishing has been sporadic. I’ve opted to release stories as I completed them rather than on a schedule. So what’s…
ByJustin Cox The Writing Cooperative is an online writing community with over 100,000 followers on Medium and 2,200 members on Slack. Despite its massive size, The Writing Cooperative started with just two people who never met. The Early Days In late 2012, Ev Williams launched a new writing platform, Medium. A year later, with the platform fully available…
ByJustin Cox While acronyms add a colloquial flair to writing, they are easy to misuse. If we’re not careful, improper acronym usage can cause immense reader pain. But before we go and diagnose the root cause of our reader’s discomfort, we need to set the record straight about something. Acronyms vs. Initialisms Acronyms and Initialisms are different…
ByJustin Cox Have you ever read a sentence that makes you cringe? For me, when words repeat for no reason my skin crawls. Take this sentence from a book I’m currently reading: My bright, rainbow-dyed hair whips across my face. This sentence makes me shiver in my bones. Can you spot the issue? It’s repetitive and redundant….
ByJustin Cox I wrote my first persuasive essay while staring at a cartoon hamburger. While gesturing to the individual ingredients that made up a neon hamburger on the overhead projector, my elementary school teacher explained the “Hamburger Method” of writing a persuasive essay. The Hamburger Method starts with the top bun: the introductory paragraph and main point….
ByJustin Cox Writers of all shapes and genres can learn a lot about writing from Jerry Seinfeld and the comedians he interviews.
ByJustin Cox I’ve been in a slump lately. Ideas are flowing, that’s not the problem. I have zero desire to sit down and actually write the things. I call this strange feeling The Funk™️. Feeling stuck, I reached out to a number of writers’ whose work I greatly admire and asked them a simple question: How do…
ByJustin Cox What advice can you give me to build an audience and get more views on my writing? Every Email I Receive As an administrator for the Writing Cooperative, I am asked this questions a few times a week. New writers are all looking for the fast pass to internet success. I don’t blame them for asking….
