We’re back again for another Five Links Friday! Give ’em a read. 1. Janice Hardy’s Fiction University has a post by Deanna Raybourn looking at The Writing Process: Your Mileage May Vary (Or Why Breaking the Rules is Okay). 2. P.H. Solomon’s Archer’s Aim blog has some advice on finding–and fixing–what’s missing from your novel. Check […]
One Big Goal to Reach by the End of the Year
I say over and over how important it is to set concrete written goals with a deadline if you want to achieve success. The problem is I don’t always follow my own advice. That’s not entirely true; I do set daily and weekly writing goals, but I often get so caught on up the short-term, […]
Five Links Friday 8/7/15
And, we’re back for another Five Links Friday. I had this scheduled to go up earlier, but had a couple of technical problems last night and needed to restore the site from backups. That meant I also lost yesterday’s post. Doh. Oh well, it could be worse. Here’s some reading about writing for ya. Enjoy! […]
Revisions: Don’t Try To Do Everything At Once
The September issue of Writer’s Digest has an article by Gabriela Pereira titled “The Great Revision Pyramid.” I was eager to read the article, as I’m working on a major rewrite of my second novel. In the article, she talks about how non-writers might think that once the first draft is written, the book is […]
Is your first draft automatically your worst?
“Good stores are not written. They are rewritten.” I’ve seen that quote attributed to everyone from Phyllis A. Whitney to Stephen King to Michael Crichton. I’m going to guess that it’s from Phyllis A. Whitney, since she lived to be 104 and would have therefore had time to come up with all sorts of nifty […]
Where does your story begin?
It seems like a simple question, but it’s not as easy to answer as you might think. Take out one of your WIPs and look at the first page. What do you see? Is it a heavy description of the setting? Is it a flashback or a wordy telling of the back-story? Is it an […]
Finding your voice through outlining
I mentioned the other day that I’m having a spat with my second novel and we’re currently on a break. In the meantime, I started working on another project, a YA horror novel that has been brewing in my head for the last few months. I came up with a quick outline and wrote a […]
Stereotypes in Fantasy
I mentioned on my author site that I’m going to take a break from revising my second novel and work on some other projects instead. That books is a fantasy young adult novel and while it’s a lot of fun, it’s also got some problems that I pretty much just lost patience with. While those […]