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Ten Story Basics To Help You Find the Story Within You
This is far from an exhaustive list, but it’s a start. If you follow these guidelines with the story you’re working on, everything about the story will be stronger.
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Take 5 Friday: Five Writerly Ways to Celebrate World Kindness Day
Today, November 13, is World Kindness Day and I’m inviting you to celebrate by being kind to your writerly self and to your writerly friends.* Given our habit of constantly trying to improve our writing, us writer-types can be a bit negative about our abilities and our skills. So, this is an excellent chance to consciously reverse that trend by choosing kindness as our lens today. Here are 5 ways you can spread some writerly kindness: Identify someone’s strengths All too often we point out the parts of people’s writing that needs improvement. Today, I challenge you to tell someone something they are doing well. Let them know that they…
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How Writing A Novel Is More Like Sculpting Marble
Now that I’m a little more experienced, I understand that page 1 of a novel is hardly the beginning of a writer’s journey. The mental image of a puzzled writer sitting at a typewriter isn’t an accurate one to me.
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Nine Questions To Ask Yourself If You Have Writer’s Block
Sometimes the words aren't there. The ideas are weak and feeble. Your fingers grow numb waiting on a decent thought from your brain. There's a problem and you can't quite figure out what it is or why you're blocked.
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How To Be A Not-So-Nice Writer
But when it comes to their writing, authors need to stop being meek. Instead, they should be as mean as they can possibly be within the confines of their genre.
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Take 5 Friday: 5 Questions for Author Jessica White
For today’s Take 5 Friday, please welcome author Jessica White. Jessica is a Christian fiction author, the founder of the 365 Writing Challenge and she is the most organized and consistent person I have ever encountered. Jessica’s current book is called Song in the Dark – A Hades/Persephone Inspired Romantic Suspense (see below for more information!) Here are Jessica’s answers to my Take 5 questions. I’m sure you will get lots of great information and inspiration from her approach to writing. 1) What aspects of writing are easiest for you? My favorite part of writing a story is coming up with the setting. When I was little, I redesigned my…
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Why Novelists Should Go To Plays
Why plays? The authors who wrote them are interested in the skills of the actor to make the meaning known. A well-written play helps us see characters as actors, helps us understand pauses, what is not being said, subtext, delicacy, and timing.
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Surviving Nanowrimo in 16 Easy Steps
For 30 days in November every year, hundreds of thousands of writers all over the world try to get 50,000 words on paper. In a perfect world, these words would be brilliant and profound. It’s far more likely that the words are a big hot mess. If you are participating, then you know that you only have a week left to get your words in.
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Why Mutually Exclusive Desires Make Great Conflicts
A great story has many kinds of conflicts all layered on each other, each eating away at the main objectives of the main character.
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Take 5 Friday: Five Scary Writing Monsters To Banish
Even the most confident authors find themselves plagued by writing monsters and since it is so close to Halloween, I thought it was a good time to identify and then banish some of those creeps. Here are some of the most common monsters that try to scare us away from writing. It can be tricky to banish them but being aware of their monsterish nature is the first step to getting rid of them – or at least keeping them quiet for a while. When you learn to recognize them quickly, you will be able to silence them quickly, too. Redy to identify some writing monsters? Let’s go! Monster #1:…
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10 Things You Should Say That Will Make You More Successful
Good thoughts produce good habits. Good habits produce good patterns. Good patterns help us grow in discipline, which makes us more confident, which allows us to succeed.
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Eight More Close-Talking, Double Dipping Tips to Succeeding At Nanowrimo!
I believe that much is to be gained from the whole exercise, even if it isn’t a coherent story. I’ve broken down the steps to writing a story for Nano into super-easy steps. If you follow them, you’ll easily make your goal. (It’s only 1,667 words a day. You can DO that!)
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Making Time To Write
How do I make time to write when I am faced with a full-time job? With practice and patience. A lot of practice and patience.
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Five MORE Ways Marketing Your Books Is Like Exploring A Jungle
(Last week we presented Five ways Marketing Your Books Is Like Exploring A Jungle. Here are ways 6-10!)