Fall in Love with Writing Your Novel (Again)
Are you in love with writing your novel? Do you love your writing? Really love writing? The whole process, from inspiration to writer’s block to editing? Would you like to learn how to love...
Tagged: novel writing
Turn Fan Fiction to Original Fiction by Erin Lale
There are many more things one could write about with respect to Norse mythology and the Norse gods (which is actually a misnomer, since the culture which gave rise to the mythology spanned the whole of northern Europe north of the Roman Empire and predated the development of modern nation-states.
Writing Dialogue: What You Say After Said by Kay Keppler
Welcome to the next installment of craft posts by monthly guest columnist, Kay Keppler, on novel writing. Today she’ll help you with writing dialogue. You can contact Kay through the Writer’s Fun Zone or at kaykeppler AT yahoo DOT com to ask...
Don’t Go Overboard: Managing Proportion for Novel Writing by Kay Keppler
Problems like these are problems of proportion. You want to give readers enough detail and discussion to hold their interest, but you don’t want to give more detail than the scene requires.
Ten Simple Tricks to Perk Up Your Writing by Steve Alcorn
The ultimate measure of you as an author is the competence with which you write. There are a few simple things you can do to perk up your writing.
How to Edit Your Novel in 3 Steps
After writing your novel — be it a romance, mystery, thriller, fantasy, horror, or science fiction — and letting it sit — I let my novels sit for 1 year — edit your novel in layers.
Write Your Novel: Settings — Make Them Do More
I can see it now—you and your Aunt Myrtle at Thanksgiving. “What’s your book about, dear?” she’ll say over turkey and gravy. And you oblige her by saying, “Well, my heroine—that’s Artemisia Bullwinkle—finds a body in the pantry and figures out that the heir and her true love—that’s Froggie Muckbottom—did it. She sends him to the Big House, where he catches chilblains and she knits him woolen booties. And it all happens in Regency England.”
Villains in Literature
We love villains in literature. WE want to spend time with the antagonist. We like the hero to have a good challenge, but it’s more than that. For good to triumph, it has to contrast with something. We can’t know what’s right till we see what’s wrong.
How To Write the Setting of a Story: Finding the Right Place
Your characters do not act in a vacuum. They live somewhere—in a house, an ocean, a country, planet, period, zeitgeist, vacuum. Often they travel to somewhere else, or aspire to. They carry baggage—metaphorical as well as literal. They have history and a future, cultural attitudes and speech patterns.
Editing Your Own Work: 3 Tips For Editing
I’m both an author and an editor, but I’m very aware of the very different demands of those two roles. As an author, I’m a firm believer that the closer to your material you are, the better. As an editor, you need a fresh pair of eyes to see the book as the reader will see it, without all the vivid abundance of character and setting which live in the author’s head and may never have made it into the book.
The Economics of Creativity: What is The Cost of Inaction? #3
How much does it cost you to do nothing? Put another way: how much do your excuses cost? Cost. Money. Economy… Not words most artists even want to think about much less read. Nevertheless, ignoring the economics of creativity — of life — would be a real shame, since all we ever do is spend and receive energy
Plot: It’s What Happens after the Shower
Everybody knows what plot is, right? It’s action. Action drives stories. Without action, without plot, you’ve got no story. Simple. But not all actions are equal. For actions to be plot, they must have consequences. Actions without consequences are setting or description.
How to Write the Perfect Pitch to Sell Your Novel In Person
Welcome to our weekly guest column by Ezra Barany, the Book Mentor and author of the bestselling novel The Torah Codes. He offers indie novelists important tips, entirely under our control, to help our books be discovered by readers all over the world. This week he focuses on how to write the perfect pitch to sell your novel in person.
No Excuses: Get to Your Writing
Welcome back to the Friday Artist Entrepreneur column. Today I tell it like it is. Even though there are no excuses about getting to my writing, boy do I have them.
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