The most important part of any story is the characters. Indeed, the characters ARE the story. If you don’t have believable characters, you don’t have a story – no matter how good the rest of the writing may be. When creating fun and realistic characters, the thing you want most is for your characters to…
The First Fifty – Crucial – Pages of Your Book Using urgency for your characters and putting them in peril to keep your readers engaged and turning the page of your book. The first fifty pages of your book are crucial for setting the hook in your readers. Something has to happen. Something exciting, or…
Benefits and Drawbacks of Each POV in Your MS How to use different points of view in your novel manuscript for fiction. As a beginning writer who chose to write my first book in first-person narrative, I discovered the drawbacks of such an approach the hard way. Halfway through the book, I started all over…
Are You Overwhelming Your Readers? World-building in science fiction novels and stories – are you giving readers too much information at a time? Have you ever run across a prologue like this: (usually in sci-fi books) Captain Briggs took the helm and began shouting orders. “Ensign, optimize the traspositional filtration valves to ignite the gravitational…
Should I use sentence fragments in my book manuscript? Is this bad writing or style? Sentence fragments. Who cares? You? Me? Anyone? Depends. Writing nonfiction? Probably wouldn’t. Work, that is. Writing fiction? Could be. Depends. On what? Style. With some authors? Might work. Others? Not so much. A hundred years ago? Wouldn’t have been acceptable….
How Many Manuscript Drafts Should You Go Through? How many times should you revise and rewrite your book? What should I do about editing my manuscript? When working on a book of any kind, if you haven’t gone through a minimum of three drafts, you probably don’t have a finished product. The first draft should…
What’s the Best Way to Write a Book? Here’s How to Write the Best Way for You There are as many answers to that questions as there are authors. And while no answer is inherently better than another, a few examples should serve to set the aspiring writer on a successful course to completing his…
The Three S’s – Scene, Setting, and Senses How to know if your book novel manuscript is ready to be published or sent to an agent. Stories don’t occur in a bubble. They have to be set in a real and believable place. And what makes a scene or setting, is detail. And what makes…
This one’s a tough nut to crack. Avoiding cliches is like avoiding headaches. We’d all love to, but there’s no way we’ll ever completely avoid them. With hundreds of cliches, they’re as thick as pea soup, and therefore, often the first ideas which come to mind. Cliches are simply too ingrained into our patterns of…
Having trouble getting motivated to write? You’re not alone. Many writers struggle with keeping up the motivation. What you often need to keep up that motivation is keep a steady momentum with daily goals. As a writer, and (recovering) procrastinator, I’ve tried lots of ways to keep going with writing – but still often let…
Yes, you need to work on your SEO skills – even if you’re just an author trying to sell books, writing a personal blog, or operating an eCommerce shop. As an author SEO should be one of the top skills to learn if you plan on doing any type of self-promoting of any kind. You…