Clichés – Enemy or Friend?
Every time I turn on the television or pick up a new book at the book store, I see yet another cliche or variation on a cliche, and I roll my eyes. “Again?”…
Writer’s Art Tools & Techniques Posts
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How to Submit Your Manuscript Part 2
Submitting Your Manuscript – Part 2 Remember, spell-check isn’t enough. You might have spelled to when you meant to spell too, something spellcheck won’t catch. It often takes only one error to signal…
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How to Submit Your Manuscript Part 1
Submitting Your Manuscript – Part 1 Congratulations! Your manuscript if finally finished. You did it. Yay! After months or even years of endless blood, sweat, toil and tears, you’ve at long last finished…
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Overwriting With Too Many Unnecessary and Unneeded Superfluous Words
For those of you who didn’t notice, (and I hope most of you noticed), only one or two of those words were necessary to properly and clearly convey the topic of my discussion….
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Building Suspense and Creating Tension Part 4
Building Suspense and Tension – Part Four Dialogue should, as a rule, always have a purpose and contain at least an element of tension. Avoid using dialogue for small talk or pleasantries –…
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Building Suspense and Creating Tension Part 3
Building Suspense and Tension – Part Three Reversals – Another time-honored way of building suspense and creating tension is to create radical reversals for your characters – reversals that jar the reader, create…
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Building Suspense And Creating Tension Part 2
Building Suspense and Tension – Part Two Uncertainty: Building suspense means creating uncertainty in the reader, and compelling them to want to read ahead to see what happens next – while in the…
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Building Suspense And Creating Tension Part 1
Building Suspense and Tension – Part One The most important thing you can do as a writer of fiction is make the reader want to turn the page. In fact, there is no…
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What is a Synopsis and How Do I Write One?
At its most fundamental level, a synopsis answers the question: What is this book about? A synopsis should cover – in abbreviated form – all the major points of your book in sequential…
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Conflict – Who Needs It? You!
If you’re a writer, YOU do. Every story needs a conflict at the center of it. If plot is the fundamental building block of a story, then conflict is the fundamental building block…
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Writing a Blurb
Writing a blurb is not easy: Anyone who thinks writing a blurb is easy, has probably never written a good blurb. The blurb I speak of here is the kind that’s found on…
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What is a Blurb? And How to Write One
For the purposes of this blog, a blurb (sometimes referred to as a short summary) is the brief description of a book’s contents found on the book’s back cover, written with the intent…
