This week we’ve been attending ProWritingAid Crime Writer’s Week. Not because we’re crafting a police procedural or whodunnit, or even because we read a lot of crime writing. It’s ProWritingAid’s first ever Crime Writer’s Week aimed at crime and thriller authors with a lot of valuable content for any writer. …
This BBC Arts thread continues on the iPlayer with Inside Cinema’s Strong Female Characters. It’s a barely-there critique that fails to nail marketing over actual writing. …
From Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots to Robert MacKee’s Story and Joseph Campbell’s the Hero’s Journey – all will tell you about the limited number of story ideas. …
When I gave out a list of rules for writing most kinds of text, I left one out: write in a conversational style. …
Have you ever sat there, thinking “I wish I could write?” Not “I wish I could write like [Joe Schmo]” or anyone in particular, just “I wish I could write.” I think you can. I don’t mean ‘the one novel that’s in all of us.’ Believe me, not everyone has a novel in them. Just write something. Write anything. …
Some seventy years after its invention the Flesch readability test is used by marketers, policy writers and bloggers; but do Readability Scores work? …
Amazon’s MOBI format for Kindle is strictly proscribed and validated whenever a file is uploaded to Amazon. Working with Kindle Create software should be the best route to a valid e-book file. But unless your book is the simplest, text-only layout, Kindle Create is a struggle. …
What’s been stopping you from producing that magnum opus? Taken from the opening of Jurgen Wolff’s 2007 Your Writing Coach, what follows is our take on his Seven Deadly Fears of Writing. …
Sixty, seventy, eighty thousand words or more. That’s your typical novel. Somehow you have to get to there from a blank page. Unless you’re an accomplished free-writer, outlining a book can help. …
There are many ways to start writing a book, both fiction and non-fiction. Without a first draft, you don’t have a book, just an idea. But a completed first draft is just that – a beginning and not an end.
Whether you sit down and start at the beginning and just write down whatever comes from your stream of consciousness, or you carefully plan and outline the whole thing from beginning to end, whatever gets you started has value. …
