Donald Maass offers a lot of advice on writing a book that breaks out a career in Writing the Breakout Novel. In his first chapter he gives scenarios of writers with ongoing careers, already published, but sliding downward. He calls himself the agent who gets the 911 career call when the author's latest novel doesn't […]
On Thursday July 28 the American Copy Editor Society is holding a 1-hour seminar on What's New in Style. I'm an ACES member, ever since I passed through the organization's Advanced Copy Editing Bootcamp at SMU last year. I brought a journalism degree and publications experience to the Society membership. ACES is different from other […]
You've been edited and proofread. You have your interior layout and cover done. Your designer has a PDF file ready for a printer someplace (Print on Demand through Amazon, or Lightning Source, maybe) and you have a ebook-ready file in MOBI (Amazon) and EPUB (everybody else) formats. It feels like you're publishing. Not yet. Your […]
Sooner or later you'll hear about writers using Scrivener. It's a writing tool that makes projects flow faster and increases your production. You write more, and faster. You find what you've written easier. It's only $40, and your writing in it will live on your laptop (you can back up to the cloud, if you […]
"Help!" a budding novelist asks, hoping to get some advice on a novel. "I'm in a contest and my entry has to be summed up in just one sentence." Summary is a mighty task. Your book of 70,000 words must be reduced to maybe 35. You can do it, but it's going to demand several […]
The #MeToo movement, also called a moment, has delivered many disturbing ones over the past months. Men have been forced to face their history with the women in their lives, and for some of them, it's a history of failures. There's not an ending coming for this movement anytime soon. It would seem the only […]
Halloween will deliver more than costumes, debauched parties and tons of candy corn. On that day at midnight it’s also the start of National Novel Writing Month, a worldwide 30-day event where the goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Those are aimed to be words for a novel — although you can hijack this event to […]
Some easy writing advice to follow, offered all the time, is show instead of tell. But it takes careful work to remove showing at the same time you remove barrier words from your writing. Barrier words are ones that make a story less vivid and make the writer more obvious. You don't want the latter to happen. We […]
Creativity requires faith, and sticking to your creative faith is easier with exemplary practices to follow. I’m a Catholic boy if you go back far enough. We learned our faith in part by studying the lives of the disciples. The root of the word disciple means to show a devotion, so these 12 practices are […]
Over at Kristen Lamb's website, a column by Cait Reynolds examines some aspects of distance to be travelled as a control of story pace. She mentions means of transit as well as physical distance. People go places in most stories, and if yours includes a trip longer than a jaunt to the bathroom, there's a time […]