You've got to read novels in order to write yours The tomatoes in my back yard didn’t need to see other tomatoes to grow. They started from seed, after all. So what good does it do to find something to emulate, while growing? The tomatoes are now small and ripening. Success is at hand. But […]
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, […]
Making your storytelling invisible and powerful is not easy. Not all at once, anyway. You can be invisible, but there's no power. Academic writing walks that tightrope. You can be powerful but not invisible. That's the realm of melodrama. To be both these things at once in fiction, try the deep-third point of view. Third […]
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 […]
Things are changing on a steady course for the trade of selling books. One analyst says the most important part of publishing has become keeping authors happy. This book industry is all about the storytellers. The industry is not the companies which make stories available and try to lure readers toward them. Imagine the […]
“And we gave her a blog tour” could turn out to be an education for you, even though a publisher is paying for it. The tour is sometimes a murky journey. It’s very hard to show how any blog tour sells books directly off the content on the blog. They often have few visitors. Success […]
Plot is the enemy of character. At least that’s the advice you find throughout the writing world, usually delivered by authors and instructors who have whipped a plot into shape so they could finish a novel. The trouble with this advice: While plot might be the enemy, we still long for something interesting to happen […]
