You might be the writer who doesn't need summaries. You're probably not, since you're not the Almighty. Only the Great Maker could skip the step of telling people what the creation was promising. The stories that started the world were formed when there was nothing else to watch or read or hear. You and I […]
Go for the big stuff first. A magic weekend, or a writing retreat, can get a good revision underway. Agent Kate McKean wrote a summary of how to approach a big project like a book revision. Agent Kate McKean suggests several steps. Here's the high points. First, reread your work in full. It takes a […]
Help those author newsletters get read by including all four food groups of content. Education: How to do a task, explained in a thorough but concise way. It might be the way to write a summary of a chapter. (Maybe it's a list of the contents for writing a useful newsletter.) Information: "This event or […]
The easiest publisher to protect your book is you Now that the actors have joined writers of TV and movies on strike, story invention is slowing to a crawl. Actors can still work on audiobooks, but just about everything else is shut down for the duration. The Emmys have been postponed, for heaven's sake. There […]
A quarter-million words is what you get if you're writing four sentences a day for eight years. The total might feel like the accomplishment of your life. A quarter-mil can also haunt you and taunt you, depending on how close you get to revisions. In the span of just three weeks, I consulted with two […]
We writers do our work by assembling understanding. As it turns out, understanding is pretty important. Now that we have AI's promises everywhere, one tech journalist says that AI isn’t an intelligence engine — it’s an understanding engine. Lots of us try to understand people we know. We know published authors, some of us. The […]
AI is a bullet, all right. Not a silver one. Still deadly. Today a class kicks off that will teach writers how to prompt a software program. $89 later, there will be hundreds more writers using AI. Prompt writing, and then revisions to prompts. Then AI output revisions, once you get to a certain point, […]
Line editing is about expression. Do you have chop on the waters of your writing, where every sentence seems to be under 12 words? Or is there a setup sentence or a summary sentence that your line editor might add that would establish a place for a passage that follows? If there’s a place for […]
You need to get people talking about your book for it to become a bestseller. There are steps for a bestseller. Advance reviews, ready to release on your Day One, help accomplish this. You can get reviews into the world before the book drops. Even if you're publishing yourself, this kind of coverage is within […]
Colleen Hoover is white-hot now. Of the ten bestselling novels of 2022, she wrote five. Her output is impressive, too. Over the last eight years, she's released twenty-six novels. She gets started because she knows how to use dialogue. How does she finish three books a year, from halfway through Obama to halfway through Biden? […]
