The worst place you can be as an aspiring writer is to have a couple of dozen stories partially complete, but no finished first drafts. I ran into this problem a lot early on. I could spend an entire night going from story to story without ever actually finishing anything. Sure, it’s good to have […]
Quick Tip # 3 – Real publishers won’t contact YOU.
There you are, an aspiring author who just finished your first masterpiece. You set up a website and shared your success on every social media platform out there, up to and including the one invented five minutes ago. You’re ready to rock and you’re ready to get noticed. And then it happens. You open up […]
Who is Mary Sue and How Can You Kill Her?
So after watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I went over to one of my favorite movie reviews sites an checked out what everybody thought about it. Most of the reviews were gushing, as you’d expect, but there were a few arguments on whether or not the main character, Rey, was a “Mary Sue” character. […]
Quick Tips # 2 : Introduce the main character first.
Another thing I see in Theme of Absence submissions that I really don’t like is when a story begins and you have no idea who the story is about. And by that, I’m not talking about a story where several characters are introduced and you wonder which one is the protagonist. I’m talking about those […]
Writing Convincing Dialogue
At times, writing the characters’ dialogue can be the easiest part of writing fiction. How hard can it be, after all, to have a couple of Joes sharing a drink and shooting the breeze, right? Wrong. Writing dialogue well is rarely easy, and it certainly isn’t simply about a couple of characters talking to each […]
Quick Tips # 1 : “Was” in the opening
One of the most common problems I see in my Theme of Absence submissions comes in the opening sentence. It’s the unnecessary use of past progressive tense and immediately takes the story down the path of telling instead of showing. Don’t do this: “C-3PO was running away toward the escape pod.” Instead, do this: “C-3PO […]
What can you do to help other writers?
Hey, it’s the first Monday of the new year. I’ll tell you this, we’ve got a little rule over here at the Write Good Books blog and that is this: NO COMPLAINING. And especially no complaining that it’s Monday. So I wanted to start off the year on a super positive note and figured what […]
Finding Your Creativity
This time of year, I see a lot of friends and family that I might only see once or twice a year. More often than not, my writing comes up as a conversation piece, and when it does, that question we’ve all been asked gets asked: “Where do you get your ideas?” I know a […]
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