Feedback Tips: Part One – When to Ask for Feedback
While it’s tempting to ask for feedback as soon as you can, it can easily be fatal to your manuscript or at least make the feedback useless.
Choosing Your Characters
When you decide to write a story, you’ll almost always already have the main characters in mind. After all, you can’t have even the idea of a story without characters to fill it out. So it may seem strange to talk about choosing your characters. But, just like when you’re evaluating a scene, you have to be sure that each character is serving a purpose and driving the story forward. It’s one of the hardest evaluations to do when you’re…
The Opening Line
Tuesday, we talked about your opening scene and what purpose it serves. It needs to introduce the main character, explain why that character is interesting, and lead into the plot. Today, we’ll focus in a little more and look at the first paragraph of the book. Some of these things may seem like they overlap with Tuesday’s post. They’re supposed to. For obvious reasons, what you’ve chosen for your first scene affects what you do in the first line. This…
The Opening Scene
Your opening scene is important, because that’s where you have to hook the reader. If they don’t care about your main character by the end of the first scene, they’re unlikely to finish your story, much less enjoy it. One book I recently started to read opened with a ten-page prologue set a hundred years after the actual story. I made it to page twelve. Another opened with the POV character talking to her sister over breakfast, with a paragraph…
Read in Your Genre
For most of us, our enjoyment of writing grew out of our love of reading. Some wanted to continue a story that someone else had written, so they write fan fiction. Some people write because they enjoy the process of storytelling that they’ve seen in other books. Personally, I write because of the world building I enjoyed in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and all the authors that have followed in his footsteps.
Said is Dead
Last week, we talked about the dangers of having a thesaurus around when you are writing. Today, we’re going to talk about one of the most common things a thesaurus will do: kill “said.”
The Deadly Thesaurus: Why Dinosaurs Don’t Belong in Your Writing Space
Most professionals understand that animals don’t belong in workspaces. Even proper pets, like dogs or spiders, tend to be distracting and prevent work from getting done. In more extreme cases, cats can destroy countless hours of work just to amuse themselves.
An Editor Grumbles About Punctuation: Exclamation Points, Commas, and Semicolons.
As you may have guessed from the title, today we’re going to talk about different errors in punctuation. I know, it’s everyone’s favorite thing to read about on a Thursday morning. But punctuation is one of those little things that can screw up a good book, especially when it changes the meaning of the sentence. Knowing the rules for how these work will help you do better in your first draft, which means editing and proofreading will go much easier.
Book Recommendation Day
This week’s book recommendation is going to be a little different. I’m going to talk about The Wretched of Muirwood by Jeff Wheeler, a book that I do recommend and enjoyed reading. But as I sat down to actually write the recommendation, I got the following:
Friday Reads
Here’s a quick snapshot at two books I finished reading this week.