Writing advice and tips.
Many people, when first deciding to write a book, land on what they know best: a personal experience. This is exactly where I started. But publishers like originality, and as Ecclesiastes 1:9 tells us, “there is nothing new under the sun” (NKJV). My first book dealt with child sexual abuse by a family member. It’s…
This is a continuation of guest blogger Kristin Noland’s post on ghostwriting. If you missed part 1, you’ll want to go back and read it.
This month’s posts are from guest blogger Kristin Noland. With over 80 manuscripts to her name—including two bestsellers, one a military thriller—Kristin has spent her career helping authors bring their stories to life and position their work for success. From intricate world-building to sharp pacing, intricate plots, and characters who stay with readers long after…
Crafting vivid story settings is all about making your readers feel like they’re actually there! But how does a writer accomplish that? I do great with dialog, never an issue coming up with things for people to say, but I still struggle with description. I have to work at it (usually in the self-editing stage),…
I’m kicking back a bit this month to relax and get focused on my next book. At this writing, I still haven’t figured out what will come next. There’s more than a decade’s worth of posts on this blog, and unless you utilize the search box in the right side bar, you’re missing out on…
Updated November 4, 2024. Knowing your target audience or ideal reader—today’s term is avatar—is important in many ways. As the term implies, you are aiming at a target, so knowing as much as you can about it will enable you to hit the bull’s-eye. Often the message you hope to convey through your fiction or…
This live interactive workshop happens Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024, at 1:00 Central time. Characters that captivate the reader are essential to all good novels. This workshop discusses a 3-step method to build your characters as well as utilizing elements outside the norm such as cultural communication differences and temperament devices like Myers-Briggs and Keirsey. Then…
What are anachronisms? Merriam-Webster Unabridged Online Dictionary defines anachronism as: “a person or a thing that is chronologically out of place especially : one from a former age that is incongruous in the present.” Anachronisms tend to occur primarily in historical fiction. It happens for various reasons, one of which is the writer failed to…