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Apples to Apples to Words: Weekly Writing Challenge
Since it’s the weekend, we want you to have a little fun with your writing* so we’re bringing back the Apples to Apples Challenge! This is *not* a contest, we’re just playing with words today, but here are the rules: Incorporate the words in large text from the cards below into a short piece of writing – 250 words or less – and post it in the comments for us all to enjoy. Please keep it family friendly! We want to show off your well-crafted work but we can’t keep it on our site if it goes against our family-friendly policy. You can explore dark topics but you have to…
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5 Links: Show Some Character
We’ve got lots of great advice here at 10 Minute Novelists but we also recommend reading widely so you can learn as much as you can about the craft of writing. Once a month, we’ll be sharing links to 5 posts on other sites that can expand and enhance your understanding of some aspect of your writing practice. Please note that these recommendations will only be for whatever is directly linked, there is no implied recommendation for products that may be sold on these sites. Here are 5 interesting posts that Christine found about developing your characters. 33 Ways to Write Stronger Characters – Kristen Kieffer’s post (and podcast) on…
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For Fact & Fiction: Borrow Non-fiction Techniques for your Fiction
By Christine Hennebury Stories are stories, whether you are reporting them or inventing them. While non-fiction writers and fiction writers each develop a specific skill set, there are lots of overlapping skills and lots of opportunity to learn from the other’s approach. In addition to my fiction, I also write community news for a variety of newspapers in my province. I’ve found that my fiction skills and my non-fiction skills both come in handy no matter which type of writing I am doing. So, I use my fiction-writing description and character development skills to enrich my non-fiction and fact-based non-fiction skills to keep my fiction sharp. Perhaps your fiction writing…
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Apples to Apples to Words: Weekly Writing Challenge
Since it’s the weekend, we want you to have a little fun with your writing* so we’re bringing back the Apples to Apples Challenge! This is *not* a contest, we’re just playing with words today, but here are the rules: Incorporate the words in large text from the cards below into a short piece of writing – 250 words or less – and post it in the comments for us all to enjoy. Please keep it family friendly! We want to show off your well-crafted work but we can’t keep it on our site if it goes against our family-friendly policy. You can explore dark topics but you have to…
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5 Questions: An Interview with Katharine Grubb
This is the first of a new interview series that we’ll be publishing on the last Thursday of each month here at 10 Minute Novelists. We’ll ask the same 5 Questions of every author and we’ll see what interesting things they have to tell us. We’re starting, of course, with our founder and leader, Katharine Grubb. 1) Where and when do you write? I write every morning at my desk, which is just a corner of my bedroom. Our homeschool morning starts at roughly 8:30, so I try to get an uninterrupted hour of writing in before then. If I don’t meet my word count goals for the day, I’ll…
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10 Tips for Writing Reviews with Ease
By Sherry Howard Before my first book was published, I never really understood how it felt to get your book reviewed. Luckily for me, a few writer friends, who understood how important reviews are, jumped in to review my newly-published book without being asked. Seeing those reviews was great, even the four-starred ones, but it made me realize that I hadn’t been great about giving reviews. And, it made me think about why people some people refuse to write reviews. In fact, a friend told me she didn’t have enough confidence to post her writing publicly, even to support me. I realized that people have the wrong idea about what…
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Apples to Apples to Words: Weekly Writing Challenge
Since it’s the weekend, we want you to have a little fun with your writing* so we’re bringing back the Apples to Apples Challenge! This is *not* a contest, we’re just playing with words today, but here are the rules: Incorporate the words in large text from the cards below into a short piece of writing – 250 words or less – and post it in the comments for us all to enjoy. Please keep it family friendly! We want to show off your well-crafted work but we can’t keep it on our site if it goes against our family-friendly policy. You can explore dark topics but you have to…
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10 Awesome Things You Get To Do If You’re A Member of 10 Minute Novelists
In 2018, my Facebook group, 10 Minute Novelists celebrated four years, 12,000+ members, and our first conference! We are pretty proud of how far we’ve come! We’d love for you to join us! This is what you get if you’re a part of this dynamic group: 1. You get to meet over 12,000 amazing writers from all over the world. Many of these writers are new to writing. Many have a lot of time restraints like full-time jobs or small children. All of them have this desire: to be a great author despite the restrictions in their life. 2. You get practical tips on craft,…
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100 Words at a Time: Getting That New Project Started
By Christine Hennebury. Half the battle with writing is getting started. The blank page seems enormous. Your brain flashes a million ideas past you…or it goes blank. Every idea you do manage to hold on to seems trite or overdone. It’s not a fun feeling. Yet, you know you *want* to write. You would love to have a story or essay or novel written. What you need is something to grab onto, a handhold, a way to pull yourself forward just a little bit. You need 100 words.* Sure, 100 words is not a full story (unless you are writing a drabble!), it’s not even enough to describe an elaborate…
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“An Open Oven Bakes No Bread” – choosing which great idea to pursue.
by Christine Hennebury. You are free but you have to choose. An open oven bakes no bread. -Paulo Coehlo Sometimes we get stuck, not because we don’t have any ideas but because we have too many. And if you are like me, you want to work on the ‘right’ one at the ‘right’ time so you don’t ‘waste’ time and energy. Of course, the truth is that, aside…
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Writerly Warm-Ups – 5 fun ways to prepare to write your story
by Christine Hennebury Are you a SERIOUS writer? Are you maybe even a bit TOO serious? Writing well requires discipline. We all know that, and we all try to practice that. Well, more like, we are all hard on ourselves for not practicing that enough. I feel like our desire to be dedicated writers who are doing things right gets in the way of our goals sometimes. I’d like to help you sidestep that instinct for a little while so you can remember what you like about writing. After all, it’s a lot easier to keep coming back to a task you basically enjoy…
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The Benefits of Planning Your Novel by Laura Laakso
By Laura Laakso My first reader (or my brutal beta, as he sometimes refers to himself) recently shared with me an idea for a crime novel and asked what I thought about the outline. I said I loved it and that he should write it. But he, ever the voice of reason, said he didn’t want the project to become a victim of his self-doubt and that instead of plunging straight into the writing, he would plan the story first. As planning a novel is an area he is new to, he asked me to blog about the benefits of planning in helping to tackle self-doubt. By a way of…
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Trick the Mind, Get Creative and Opening Lines
By Tina Neyer As fiction writers, we strive to create believable stories that have a message. Whether creating worlds based on fact or fantasy the best stories begin with strong opening paragraphs. Let’s face it, beginnings are hard to get right. The beginning is the most read part of any work, flash fiction or novel. The reader has a choice in those first lines whether to continue reading or not. The opening becomes a focus in my work usually by revision five or six. Identifying the problem becomes a challenge. I word-smith, share with my writing group, and then go for a walk in the woods, bake cookies, read other…
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Five Lies I Believed About Poetry Writing
Over the last few months, I’ve been spending more and more time studying poetry. I’m not afraid to try new things or expand myself in new directions. I’m finding, and I’m sure that this will be news to some of you, that you can write poetry faster than you can write novels! I find this to be especially exciting. Why not try writing poetry? But the problem is that the more I studied, the more intimidated I became. I still have to work in 10-minute increments, so I’m finding that reading anthologies, listening to the Poetry Foundation’s podcasts, taking my time with this study is not hard to do. Yet, I…