A Proofreader in Your Pocket
A Proofreader in Your Pocket A Guest Post by Nikolas Baron from Grammarly Do you enjoy editing and proofreading your own work? If you’re like most writers, self-editing is a slog—but it doesn’t have to be. You can use an automated proofreading tool, such as the popular program Grammarly, to supplement your self-editing process. There […]
When to Focus on Your World
An ad for a popular screenwriting class recently stated, “A great screenplay starts with character,” so their latest offering was on creating great characters. But that’s not how many writers start.You see, a great character has to come from someplace, has to interact with his environment, his world. If you’re writing contemporary mainstream stories, you […]
A Question of Balance
As a new writer, I heard that the average writer took seven years to go from being a novice to professional. I wondered if I could speed up the process. So I set a goal to begin making money within one year. To that end, I began to study (taking classes in college, reading books, and reading the works of other authors) on a daily basis. I also set goals for writing—finishing short stories, poems, and working on novel chapters on a weekly basis.
The Loneliness Problem
I often look for similarities in great stories to see what works. One aspect that I see very often is that powerful stories resolve “the loneliness problem.” Normally, we are never told that our protagonist is lonely, but it’s there in the background: Scrooge is a miserly old man in a musty house. Harry Potter […]
Bring Creative Solutions to Your Writing Career
Earlier this week I wrote about some new challenges facing Indie authors and suggested that one solution to them might be to look again at traditional publishing. But there are more solutions than that! For example, have you ever considered creating a “Writers’ Ring”? A writers’ ring is a group of authors who generally like […]
New Struggles in Self-Publishing
I hesitate to mention problems with self-publishing. In some genres, such as romance or self-help books, the industry is doing great. But for those who are trying to sell fiction, it seems that the markets are contracting, and it appears that things will go from bad to worse. If you’ve been self-publishing for the past […]
Be Double-Minded
The Apostle James warned that “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” For characters, being double-minded is a good thing. A “double-minded” person has the quality of duality. That means that he is unstable, and the reader can never be quite sure what he will do under certain circumstances. Given this, the character’s […]
Be Honest
A story needs to be honest. Now, that isn’t quite the same as saying that a story must be true. Obviously when we are writing fiction, we are basically telling lies in order to enlighten and entertain. So fiction stories aren’t true. Yet in order for a story to work, there must be a good […]
Be Imaginative
Artist Zaria Forman, source: The Daily Mail I judge stories for the world’s largest fantasy and science fiction writing contest. When I’m judging, the first thing that I look for is a great idea, a great concept. I search for something original. The most common failure in a story is a failure of imagination. You […]
The Truth About Writer’s Block
Some authors never get “Writer’s Block,” and they don’t believe that it exists. They’ll blithely say, “Do doctors ever get ‘Doctor’s block,’ or do plumbers ever get ‘plumber’s block’?” and they think that they’ve just scored a point. If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have told you much the same. The […]