Something hit me when I was going through my folder of unfinished stories the other day. No matter the size of the story–some were only a few hundred words while others were several thousand–they all had one thing in common. For every story in that folder, I thought, “Hey, that’s a pretty cool idea,” followed […]
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 […]
Feeling Overwhelmed?
In a recent post at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers blog, Patricia Stoltey asked: What if You Want to Quit Writing? She asks in the article, What if you haven’t achieved as much as you’d hoped, or worse, you’re just beginning and are feeling overwhelmed and suicidal? While I rarely, if ever, feel anything remotely […]
Five Links Friday 7/3/15
Three day weekend! Here’s some stuff to read in between blowing stuff up and eating hotdogs. 1. A pitch sessions can be one of the most important and frightening things a new writer can do. Here is an article that can help ease the pain by Lisa Katzenberger at Writer’s Digest: 4 Questions Agents Ask […]
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 […]
8 Things Writers Need to do Besides Writing
Sadly you don’t get to just sit down at your computer, write a book, send it to your publisher and then play video games all day. If you want to be a writer, you’ve got to do some work. A lot of work, actually. And none of that work even includes writing. Here is a […]
Promoting your book locally
Check out this chilling statistic from a 2011 article posted on The Motley Fool: Out of at least 1.2 million titles published by the entire industry over the course of a year, almost 80% sell fewer than 100 copies. Similarly, according to this article at Forbes.com, the average book in the United States sells less […]
Looking Ahead: My writing goals for the next six months
Before I started Write Good Books, I kept a daily blog on my author site. One of my regular gimmicks there was to begin every month with a post listing my goals for the month and ending every month with a progress report on whether or not I reached those goals. That feature didn’t carry […]
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