Contributed by Debra Eckerling While you can use activity to find inspiration and breathe life into your projects, sometimes what you really need is a new idea. Whether you are writing blog posts, prose, or long-form fiction or non-fiction, sometimes you need to go back to basics and find a kernel of an idea to…
Category: writing tips
Three Tips on Starting a Book Series
Contributed by Linda Wilson Writer Beware: “Series are tricky. Writing series is not for the faint of heart.” So says Janet Lane Walters, award-winning author of series in multiple genres and more; as quoted in my latest find, Writing the Fiction Series: The Complete Guide for Novels and Novellas, by Karen S. Wiesner. I am…
Writers and Self-Doubt
When self doubt about what you’re trying to accomplish creeps into your thoughts, make a decision to either carry through with your goal or trash it and go on with something else you’re more certain of.
3 Tips to Help Launch Your Writing Career
Your story begins with an idea, an idea that has come from one of your own experiences or someone’s experience that you’ve observed. To write your story, you first need to do your homework: read up on writing for children, read other authors’ books in your genre, take courses, go to conferences, join a critique…
Editing and Revisions – Do a Verb and Word Check
Editing is a must before submitting your manuscript and part of editing means checking for verbs and overuse of words.
Writing Success – You Have to Walk the Walk
“To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe.” ~ Anatole France There are so many amazing quotes out there that focus in on what needs to be done to succeed in business (writing is a business), and does it in a sentence or two. The…
80 Quotes to Get You Moving Toward Your Goals
80 quotes to help inspire and motivate you to take the steps needed to achieve your goals.
Inspiration Versus Motivation
I thought I’d start the new year with a couple of inspirational and motivational quotes. This led me to the question of are these two words interchangeable. A lot of us throw the words inspirational and motivational around a lot, so I decided to do a bit of research on their meanings. The keyword search…
Authors – How to Handle Feedback
Contributed by Suzanne Lieurance We all will need to handle feedback at one time or another in our careers. For the writer, this feedback is usually the critique of either an unpublished manuscript (from an editor or members of a critique group) or a published piece (a review, for example). Feedback can be both positive…
Naming Your Characters A-Z
Contributed by Melinda Brasher I recently read a book where eight significant characters (which was a good percentage of the significant characters) had names that began with the letter A. To make matters more confusing, it was a fantasy book, so many of the names were not familiar to us. The worst combo was Avem…