Boosting Your Prose – Part 1: Setting
I am currently in Denver but thought I would share some of the checklists I use to make sure my stories are “up to snuff.” I think that setting is a great place to begin being it is integral for your stories. Can you imagine Lord of the Rings without The Shire or Mordor? Or […]
Describe Your Book
There’s great value in taking a dispassionate look at your recent draft of a novel and assigning a description. When I was younger, I used a very simple tier system for books. I would classify them as 1) A mess 2) Publishable 3) Possible award-winner Obviously, no one wants to write a mess. Yet very […]
How Long Will Your Book Be?
Right now I’m editing a novel that is about 200,000 words long but her agent wants the book to be closer to 100,000 words, so that it will be more acceptable to major Young Adult publishers. So, the question becomes, what do you cut? Well, I’m ¾ of the way through and have managed to […]
The Problem with “They”
In my Writing Enchanting Prose workshops I teach my students to open a story in such a way that it doesn’t leave ambiguity about who the viewpoint character is, where he or she is, or what they are doing. In other words, if Jeff Gormsky is chasing a carjacker down a back alley in Chicago, […]
Audience Analysis Part 5
Identifying Your Book’s Target Audience Tuesday I explained a little bit about how the term “resonance” is used in literature. In music we use it to describe how one melody draws power from what came before, and in literature we do the same. Thus, when you read a book that affects you powerfully–whether it be […]
Analyze Your Audience Part 4
For the past few days I’ve been talking about how you can try to maximize the size of your audience for a novel. Today I’m going to give you what is probably the most important lesson that I can give to a new writer. So let’s start talking first about the buying habits of book […]
Analyze Your Audience Part 3
I mentioned in yesterday’s post three elements common to all of the bestselling movies and books of all time–the fact that ALL of them are set in another time and place, nearly all of them are aimed at a broad audience (the only exception in film being The Godfather, which was aimed at a primarily […]
Analyze Your Audience Part 2
I took a lot of writing classes in college, and I think that in just about every one that I took, the professor pointed out that the world is made up of both men and women, but beginning writers typically only write stories for people of their own sex. That’s because they are used to […]
Writers of the Future
Recently I finished editing L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers and Illustrators of the Future, Volume 35, and in another week I’ll begin judging for next year’s anthology. For those who don’t know what the Writers of the Future contest is, it’s a contest that was founded more than 35 years ago by L. Ron Hubbard. Over the […]
Audience Analysis Part 1
Identifying Your Book’s Target Audience As a new writer, you might not have given a great deal of thought to audience analysis. I’ve known good writers who don’t seem to understand it at all. For example, one #1 New York Times Best-selling fantasy author right now insists that he doesn’t write fantasy. He has magic […]