Writing the RIGHT Details
Writing the right details will help you craft more immersive, meaningful, and layered stories. If you’ve been writing very long, you’ll know the importance of mentioning details in your writing. Appealing to the senses and attention to detail is what will ground your reader and bring your story to life. Details often make it so […]
Write a Bestselling Novel in Three Easy Steps
So what goes into writing a bestseller? Here are three overall keys.
1. Write for a huge audience.
2. Serve Your Audience!
3. Market Effectively.
Free Advice to Improve Writing
The main things to remember when asking yourself “How can I improve my writing skills?” are:
1. Remember, free writing advice comes from the heart.
2. But watch out for ignorant advice.
3) Beware of teachers who hold back vital information.
4) Even the greatest writers can be poor teachers.
5) When seeking wisdom, search widely. Test the advice.
David Farland’s Writing Tips: Surprise and Revelations
An even richer source for surprise than setting is your cast. You can of course use the same techniques for creating surprises in characters as you do for settings. You can for example make a character a bit strange or grotesque. In The Godfather, we are fascinated by Don Corleone because of his strange nature—he’s powerful, seemingly warm-hearted one moment and unbelievably vicious the next.
When Stories Break
You started a story a while back that felt important and vital to you then, but you’ve matured, and it just doesn’t move you.
When that happens, write something else. Your head and your heart need to be in agreement. Many prolific writers suggest that when you feel thrilled by a story, you should apply your butt to a chair and hammer it out in the heat of passion.
3 Simple Ways to Decide Which Story Idea You Should Write About
Here are 3 Simple Ways answer “Which Story Idea I Should I write?”
Write the one that will make you the most money.
Powerful Openings
The world is full of possibilities, but unless you push yourself, struggle to drive your story to its limits, you will never make real discoveries. You won’t glean the insights that your story needs to take it from the mundane to the sublime.
Audience Analysis Part 1
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 in his stories, and dragons–but […]
Accepting Responsibility for Your Novel: Editing
When you write a novel, the chances are good that the publisher will hire editors to massage your text. There are problems with that, of course. Not all editors are as good as you’d like. Editors get tired. Editors don’t get paid enough. Editors have lapses of judgment. Your editor might not like your work. […]
Most Common Editing Problems
One time I taught a writing workshop in Salt Lake City and spent some time reading stories. In the past, I haven’t spent much time talking about stylistic problems, but I thought it would be interesting to bring up the six problems that I see most often: 1) Weak verbs. Very often, people will use […]
