Get past your fears, your doubts, your lack of expertise, your (you fill in the blank), about creating a writer/author website for yourself. As a writer you want to give readers and potential publishers and magazine editors a place to go and find out more about yourself. In fact, it’s a must. Your website is…
When I heard New York Times best-selling author Cecil Murphey (90 Minutes in Heaven) was doing a workshop for the writers group I belong to, I wasted no time in signing up. How better to learn about writing than to be taught by a multiple, best-selling author? During the day, he taught on dialog. Here’s part of…
In his book The Art of War for Writers, James Scott Bell says, [E]very character in every scene must have an objective, otherwise he shouldn’t be there. Replace him with a chair. Review your WIP. If you find a character(s) who is superfluous? Do as Bell suggests, rewrite the scene and cut the character. Now reread the…
The benefits of membership in a writer’s organization are numerous. The benefits vary from organization to organization, but here are just a few: Submission call-outs (markets accepting stories such as Chicken Soup for the Soul) Networking with other writers Print or e-newsletters of industry news and writing techniques Discounts on organizational contests and conferences Webinars,…
Formatting your submissions according to a publication’s writer’s guidelines is essential. Finding those guidelines isn’t always easy, and even in this day of digital everything you often have to request guidelines via email. For easy reference, FreelanceWriting.com provides a database of 836 writer’s guidelines, by category. http://www.freelancewriting.com/guidelines/pages/
Point of view. Think about those words and it will help you. From whose perspective are you viewing your scene? Whose feelings and thoughts are being expressed in the scene? Example from my present WIP: Chase stared at Karl with what he hoped was a questioning, please-continue look in his blue eyes, but Karl just…
I regularly notice that writers incorrectly shift from one character’s point of view (POV) to another. That is, they give us more than one POV in the same paragraph. I know I did when I first began writing fiction, and I continued to struggle until I got my brain wrapped around what POV is. Nancy…
Today is the first in a new series I call Friday Feature. I thought it would be fun to interview authors and find out what their publication journey was like and wanted to offer them a free tool for marketing their debut book. Friday Feature will appear every third Friday of the month and will…