Writing advice and tips.
Copyright infringement concerns many creative people, be they writers, musicians, movie makers, or otherwise. A complaint I hear from many beginning writers deals with copyrights and whether publishers will steal their stories. Having a rudimentary understanding of the law will put your mind at rest. An idea is not copyright protected. According to attorney Tonya…
Before you can request permission to use copyrighted material you must know one very important item: who owns the right to grant permission. That right does not always belong to the author of the work. With books, it is often the publisher who holds permission rights. The info is generally found on the reverse side…
There are a number of businesses that offer to help you obtain your copyright registration—for a fee, of course, and often an exorbitant one. The process is not difficult, not costly, and generally not that time consuming either. You can accomplish it either online (costs $35) or by submitting paper forms (costs $65). Here’s how:…
Updated June 2026 The Fair Use Doctrine relates to copyright law and is a limitation on an author’s copyright that allows for the limited use of copyrighted material without the author’s permission. Generally, there is no specific word count or lines used that considered fair. And the distinction between what is fair and infringement isn’t…
So you want to use part of someone else’s book/music/art/poem in your book. You’ve just entered the realm of copyright law. Was that work published before 1923? If so, it has entered the realm of public domain. It can be freely used, but you must cite the original source. Some works published between 1923 and…
Let’s connect the pieces of plot, scene, and sequel. Plot at its most basic level is your lead character’s goal and the journey to reach that goal. That journey is played out in the scenes and sequels of your story. Scenes show the reader the individual steps your character takes to reach his or her…
Unlike the scene, which happens moment by moment, the passage of time in a sequel is flexible. Here you can move quickly through hours or days (even months) in your story. What took 158 words as a scene can be written in much fewer words. I’ll take our last example, a scene, and make it…
Time is a story element with which many beginning writers struggle. Whether your novel occurs over a period of days or years, you must lead us through that time. In scenes, time passes moment by moment. This means we see the action as it happens. Let’s pick up the action where Friday’s sequel left off…