Aug 09 2008
B. Mac reviews and revises the titles of 30 manuscripts submitted to a writing workshop. This will help you evaluate and improve your titles.
Aug 08 2008
If you have a list of links in your sidebar or site-map, test the links once a month. It amazes me how often we change the permalinks without updating the sidebar. The monthly link-test is easily the most productive minute I spend on website design.
Aug 08 2008
This short article will help beginning novelists avoid another five common mistakes that will usually cause publishers to throw out a manuscript.
Aug 06 2008
I don’t expect to post very much today, given that I’ll be in transit for 18 hours. However, in the meantime, I will leave you with this nugget of wisdom: avoid immortal characters. They’re terrible.
Aug 05 2008
From Wired.com: “Thomas Edison, never shy about exploiting a situation to his advantage, especially if it could cripple a rival, therefore built the electric chair to operate on alternating current [the preferred system of his rivals]. By associating the Tesla-Westinghouse current with something as unpleasant as capital punishment, Edison hoped to turn public opinion his way. He even suggested replacing the new coinage, electrocution, with ‘to be Westinghoused.’ It never caught on.”
That invented use of “Westinghouse” is brilliant. Which words could you repurpose for your fiction?
Aug 05 2008
If you ever come across one of these words as you rewrite, please replace it with something more specific and spicy.
Did I forget any words you love to hate?
Aug 05 2008
Mary Sues are characters that are overpowerful, self-insertions of the author. This article will help you identify and fix some of the biggest problems with Mary Sues.
Aug 04 2008
Expecting perfection from the first draft will probably paralyze you. On the first draft, the most important thing is to write something and then you can turn it into a coherent, clean masterpiece later. When you’re writing the first draft, it may help to think of your job as giving your internal self-editor material to work with rather than writing a story fit for public consumption.
Here are a few suggestions to avoid perfectionist impulses during the first draft…
1) Don’t edit.
2) If you get stuck on what happens in one part of the story, summarize it in a few sentences and move on. You can fill it in later.
3) Commit yourself to writing for at least 30 or 45 minutes. After ten minutes of accomplishing little, you will hopefully start to feel frustrated and lower your expectations. “Maybe this line is good enough.”
Aug 04 2008
City Journal wrote a well-researched article on the future of conservative nonfiction, but I’d like to make a larger point about political nonfiction. “Since the new conservative imprints have far less latitude than traditional nonfiction imprints to fail, they tend to rely heavily on, and largely be defined by, a handful of proven iconic authors.” It’s probably true that smaller publishers have to be wary about rolling the dice with noncelebrities. But, because of blogging, I think that it’s tremendously difficult for a non-celebrity of any political persuasion to publish political nonfiction. Readers can find blogs that offer any style of political thought for free. Some blogs are exceedingly well-written and intelligent. So why would anyone want to pay for your opinion? Because you’re someone who has an invaluable perspective because you used to be a President, a secretary of state, or are a hugely popular talk-radio host, etc…*
Aug 03 2008
Observations from the Balcony suggests it is because mysteries are helped more by cinema than other forms of literary fiction. I’d lay out two alternate theories: 1) it’s far easier to make a detective story intriguing and interactive, because the readers can solve the case alongside the detective. 2) The premises, particularly in detective mysteries, are easier to sell than exotic premises that use magic or advanced technology.
Additionally, I think it’s slightly easier to write mysteries…
Aug 03 2008
The author best known for Gulag Archipelago has passed away.
Aug 03 2008
Cadet Davis reviews and revises the titles of 30 manuscripts submitted to a writing workshop. This will help you evaluate and improve your titles.
Above Average
Aug 02 2008
When you try to sell your work to a publisher or readers, please do not use the word “parody” interchangeably with “comedy.” A parody imitates the style or plays on the conventions of an author/genre /work to make fun of it. Most comedies are not parodies. There are two common reasons that authors may misuse the word parody…
Aug 02 2008
A character strikes a pose by doing anything that’s primarily designed to give readers an interesting visual. Unlike well-executed visuals, poses are usually distracting and rarely add anything like character development or immersion to the story. It’s usually more effective to rewrite the visual to show us something about the character. For example, a character that admires his weapon is striking a pose because he’s not telling us anything interesting about himself. You could fix that by having the character run his finger across the blade to test its sharpness. That helps develop the character as a competent and tough swordsman. In contrast, someone who just admires the weapon probably fails to show any of his own traits and is offering a visual only for its own sake.
Aug 02 2008
I found these two articles on writing male speech and female speech quite useful.
Aug 01 2008
I found this resource very useful to anyone that’s writing a book proposal: What Publishers Want to See Most in a Book Proposal.
Aug 01 2008
“I cannot say this often enough: if your backstory is more interesting than your current era, you’re writing the wrong story.” — the Paperback Writer
Aug 01 2008
This short article will help beginning novelists avoid another five common mistakes that will usually cause publishers to throw out a manuscript.
Aug 01 2008
A poster from Edmonton, my favorite Canadian city, notices that the new Wolverine trailer has Wolverine in an American military uniform. Assuming this isn’t just a Hollywood gaffe, Marvel is probably rewriting Wolverine as an American rather than a Canadian.
This isn’t as annoying as Superman’s motto getting changed to “truth, justice and the American way all that stuff” or the inseparably American GI Joe getting turned into international peacekeepers, but Canada still deserves better than this.
Jul 31 2008
We’ve added 12 articles and a new section on dialogue to our index of writing articles.
Jul 31 2008
Jul 30 2008
I wouldn’t recommend putting an animal in your title unless the animal actually features prominently in your book. No matter how obvious you think it is that Corporate Wolf is not actually about a Canis lupis, the red herring will throw off at least a few (and possibly many) of your readers. It would probably be worth your time to take out the animal name, particularly if your book will be on a shelf with fantasy or science fiction offerings.
Jul 30 2008
Archives are not a particularly effective way to organize your website’s content. A list of years and months doesn’t help readers figure out what sort of content your site offers. In contrast, listing a few of the categories you post in most frequently will help readers understand what your website offers. Archives are also inadequate because they’re daunting and impenetrable for new viewers. I wouldn’t recommend placing archives high in your sidebar, although you may that they are useful at the bottom because returning viewers like using them.
I recommend placing index pages ahead of archives. For example, readers that click on the entries in our Top Categories sidebar get sent to an index page where we tried to lay out our content intelligently. For example, our index of writing guides organizes 30 writing articles into seven sections, such as Characterization and Common Writing Mistakes. Readers can navigate through an index more easily than through a flood of articles thrown at them in no particular order. If readers can easily find the content that interests them, they are far more likely to actually read it.
What do you think? Which sites do you find particularly easy to navigate?
Jul 30 2008
Jul 29 2008
This article will help you write tight and effective dialogue, courtesy of Shut Up, He Explained.
Jul 29 2008
Fans of trippy science-fiction novels everywhere can rejoice that Neuromancer is getting a movie. In other good news, the movie poster shown by i09.com looks pretty stylish and suggests that it won’t be a remake of Swordfish.
The bad news is that Hayden Christensen, the same “actor” that ruined Star Wars and Jumper, is starring as Case. Dare I say that John Travolta could do this better? Egads. How could we have come to the point where John Travolta is the lesser of two acting evils? Hayden [censored]ing Christensen.
Our RSS Feed