Wondering how to start a novel? Well, avoid these 25 mistakes and you’ll be well on your way. This list was made in honor of NaNoWriMo, which started yesterday, and I post it as a tribute to all those souls trying to knock out 50,000 words in a mere 30 days. Good luck to all of […]
In the golden days of publishing, every writer got a developmental editor. Not anymore. Editors today are inundated with manuscripts and are looking for manuscripts that require little polishing. Every publishing house still employs proofreaders, to ensure the text is free of glaring errors, but many books are published without the insight of a developmental editor. […]
The first step to successful collaborative writing? Abandon the false idea that writers write better when they work alone. People usually think of writers as quiet and brooding loners who separate themselves from society in order to write. The solitary writer is imagined as an introvert, alone at the desk. But this fantasy of what […]
So you want to learn how to write in second person point of view? You’ve come to the right place. What is 2nd person point of view? Second person point of view is when the writer uses “you” as the main character in a narrative. Example using the first line of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: 1st person: […]
Writers are often bad editors of their own work. Even when they are fantastic draft writers, they need help from an outside eye to get it to the next level. Still, there are some easy tips that will improve your skills as an editor of your own work. The editing tips below are not, for […]
The perfect length of a short story can be tricky to figure out. Make it too long and you exceed the reader’s attention span and nobody wants to publish it; make it too short and you have flash fiction on your hands. Edgar Allan Poe described the proper length of a short story by saying […]
If you’re like me, you go through the same editing motions with every single piece of writing. Why not change it up? Consult these 15 innovative editing strategies and you’ll find a way to edit your book into greatness. By following these, you’ll strike the perfect balance between copy editing (grammar and spelling mistakes) and […]
There are three parts to a character: a personality, a backstory, and a motivation. These three things are what create your story. Most important of the three is the character’s desire, or motivation. A motivation has the potential to be the backbone of the entire story, create a character arc, or add a more complex dimension […]
What would you do if a writer emailed you saying they were going to commit suicide? It happened to Cynthia McCabe, a journalist at the Washington Post. She was in bed one night, checking her email, and read an email from a complete stranger named Dennis Williams who said that he’d published one novel that no […]
With his new Random House release, “How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers,” author Richard Cohen shines a light on history’s greatest storytellers. This spectacularly written how-to is not your average road map to becoming a pro. Throughout the pages of this delectable dish of writing advice, Cohen delves […]
