Karen Woodward

Wednesday, April 24

How To Create A Press Kit

When I posted the other day about how Mike Reeves-McMillan got honest book reviews he mentioned having put together a press kit.

Having a press kit seems like a great idea since it means you'll have all the important information about both yourself and your books in one place for anyone interested to browse through.

Also, having a press kit makes it easy for the author when she/he needs to send information about the book to someone months--or years--after the launch. There's no wondering which directory the information is in, no panicked searches (or perhaps that's just me!). You know where all the information is and it's easy for anyone to access.

So, what, exactly, should go into a press kit?

Building A Press Kit: Author Information

In her article, Book Marketing: Creating Your Author Press Kit, Tolulope Popoola discusses how to put together your own press kit.

1. Author biography

I hate writing these! But it is one of the first things people want to know. What's your background, what kind of books do you write, how did you become a writer?

Tolulope writes:

Your author bio should be about 200 words, and it should have things that make you sound interesting and professional. You should include your name, your place of birth or where you currently live, what you do (or used to do) for a living, what you’ve written, perhaps your education (if it’s relevant), quirky hobbies, or interesting travel experiences. Basically, anything that will make you stand out.

This would also be a good place to list any relevant awards, were any of your previous books best-sellers, and so on.

2. Contact information

How can folks get a hold of you? A website? Blog? Twitter? Facebook? Also, list your agent if you have one.

3. Press release

Steven Lewis advises writers to pay less attention to what your book is about than to what it can do for your readers. Also, consider what market, what demographic, would be most interested in your book.

4. Sample author Q&A

Writers, bloggers especially, are always hungry for more information, so give them some! Tolulope writes:

Make a list of interview questions (and responses) about you and your book. This can include questions about your background, your inspiration for writing this book, why you chose to self-publish, your own favorite writers, future projects, etc. This section is particularly helpful for the interviewer and bloggers who want to help you promote your work, as it’s useful and ready content for them.

Building A Press Kit: Book Information

Book sample

Provide up to three chapters. As for what format you should offer them in, Tolulope made a PDF available for download, but I would suggest making your sample chapters available in as many formats as possible.

If you're having trouble converting your book from one format to another, you could try Calibre. The program is free and it's awesome.

Cover image

Often if a person is writing about your book they'll want a picture, so it's a good idea to provide the cover image. I don't think you need to provide this in many different formats, a jpg should be enough.

Where the book can be found on the web

List wherever your book can be bought as well as other sites it is featured on, sites such as Goodreads.

Sample reviews

Provide excerpts from reviews along with a link to the full text on the web.

The books "one line"

This is one line that sums up the primary conflict in your novel. For instance, they used to write a one line description of a movie on the can a reel of film was stored in that described the movie.

Nathan Bransford has written excellent how-to articles about how to summarize your book in a sentence. (see: How to Write a One Sentence Pitch)

Brief Book Summary

This is generally quite short, something under 200 words or so. For example, this is Nathan Bransford's brief book summary for Jacob Wonderbar.

Jacob Wonderbar has been the bane of every substitute teacher at Magellan Middle School ever since his dad moved away from home. He never would have survived without his best friend Dexter, even if he is a little timid, and his cute-but-tough friend Sarah Daisy, who is chronically overscheduled. But when the trio meets a mysterious man in silver one night they trade a corn dog for his sassy spaceship and blast off into the great unknown. That is, until they break the universe in a giant space kapow and a nefarious space buccaneer named Mick Cracken maroons Jacob and Dexter on a tiny planet that smells like burp breath. The friends have to work together to make it back to their little street where the houses look the same, even as Earth seems farther and farther away.

Longer Book summary

This can be as much as 5,000 words or so that summarizes what happens in each chapter of your book (in other words, a synopsis) or it can be a book summary like you did above, just a bit longer. If you're like me you started off with a longer description and had to whittle it down to the essentials so you already have it.

Some sites (Smashwords for example) allow you to post both long and short descriptions so it's handy to have both, just in case.

By the way, this article of Nathan Bransford's is, hands down, the most helpful article I've read on summarizing a novel: The One Sentence, One Paragraph, and Two Paragraph Pitch. Also, see his article on how to write a one sentence pitch.

Example of a press kit

Tolulope included a link in her article to Michael Hyatt's press kit.

That's it!

What advice would you give a new author interested in assembling a press kit?

Tuesday, April 23

Chuck Wendig On Fairy Dross And Pegasus Dreams

Chuck Wendig has written another post about writing, the kind that makes me want to spring up from my computer chair, punch the air a few times and, in a voice crackly with disuse, declare, "I love being a writer."

Of course, results may differ.

Chuck's post came as a response to J. Robert Lennon who had objected to the oft given piece of advice to put ones butt in a chair and write.

Though Chuck Wendig admits that this "isn't a particularly stunning piece of writing advice in the sense that it fails to teach you how to write" he thinks it's true. He writes:

What I’m saying is, the creative process is alarmingly internal. A great deal of it goes on up in our — *taps forehead* — brain-gourds, stirring around in a great bubbly froth. It’s imaginary. It’s intellectual. It’s ephemeral, if we let it be. It’s fairy dross and pegasus dreams, man. The only way to take what is imaginary and make it a reality is to put your ass in the chair and write.

I found that inspiring.

I've been writing every day--well, at least 6 days a week--and putting my work out there and it can be brutal. Often when I'm writing it's like I have a voice (sometimes it feels more like a chorus) that tells me the best thing I could do for the world would be to put down the pen. Now!

But I ignore that voice and each time it gets easier to ignore.

Except when it doesn't.

But I still write.

So that's my long winded way of saying that Chuck's post was like a warm smelly hug from the strange uncle after a particularly terrible day at school. Very welcome and comforting yet slightly disturbing.

(BTW, I mean that in the best possible way. In case you haven't guessed, although I've never had the pleasure of meeting him, I admire Chuck Wendig as a writer.)

Anyhow, the following quotation is longer than I usually feel comfortable posting but it's so great I have to share it with you, or you can just go to Chuck's post and read the whole thing. (And you should!)

Ready? (Oh, and the following has swearing in it, so be warned.) This is the bit I'm going to print off and put on my wall, above my writing desk:

It’s work. It’s not always pleasant work. Sometimes it invokes a deep, almost psychic pain — an anxiety that blooms into an acid-spitting flower corrosive to confidence and craft. And yet, the words are the words. They only matter when they manifest. And you’re the magician that summons them into existence — their manifestation is on you and you alone. Nobody said it would be easy. Nobody’s saying you have to write thousands of words per day. You write what you can write. But that verb is still in place: write. Whether you write ten words or ten-thousand, they still involve you taking off your pants, setting your coffee onto its coaster, petting your spirit animal, then sitting your ass into the chair and squeezing words from your fingertips until you collapse, unable to do any more. It doesn’t matter if it’s good. Not now.

It only matters that it’s done.

Put your ass in the chair.

No, that doesn’t tell you how to write.

But it does tell you where it begins and where it ends: with you. You are a character with agency. You are a god in this world. Creativity is a worthless state of being without the verb that triggers it: to create. Creativity is the match. You still need to strike it and light the fire.

You can’t just always bully your way through a story, true. A great deal of writing remains in the head. And it comes with patience. And craft. And with your burgeoning intuition. Just the same, the end result of writing is the written word.

And the words only get written when you fucking write them.

Want to read some of Chuck Wendig's work? Here's a link to some of his short fiction and here's a link to the first chapter of his upcoming book Unclean Spirits (May 7, 2013). By the way, the book can be pre-ordered over at Amazon for $6.66. Nothing ominous about that. Nope. ;)

How To Write A Critique: The Sandwich Method

Today I read Jody Hedlund's excellent article, 5 Tips For Finding a Competent & Compatible Critique Partner. If you are looking for a someone to give you feedback on your stories, it is well worth the read.

As I read Jody's article I remembered a post by Nathan Brandsford from a few years ago on how he (NB was an agent at the time) evaluated a manuscript and whether it was necessary for him to like it. (It wasn't.)

I didn't find it--I'll pass along the link if I ever do, it was a great article--but I happened across this one by Rick Daley on how to write a critique.

Rick Daley: How To Write A Critique

Rick writes:

I recommend the sandwich approach, where you start with a positive point, give an honest opinion of what doesn’t work for you (may be multiple points), and then end with another positive point or words of encouragement. I’ve found that the sandwich approach helps put recipients at ease (especially if they are hungry). It makes people more receptive to constructive criticism and keeps them from getting overly defensive. If you are taking the time to provide the feedback, you should want the person to actually do something with it.

Excellent advice! I encourage you to read the rest of his article: Critiquing Critiques.

Monday, April 22

How Robert J. Sawyer Writes A Novel

I just came across this interview with Hugo and Nebula Award winner, Robert J. Sawyer.

How Robert Sawyer creates his characters

The characters almost always come out of the research I do. For instance, in Frameshift, Pierre Tardivel started out simply as a man at risk for a genetic disorder, but as I learned more about such things, his background, motivations, and thoughts grew more complex and subtle. I really do believe what Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche said: "If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person."

Robert Sawyer's advice for aspiring science fiction authors:

As a business, science fiction is very similar to mystery. Both have healthy short-fiction marketplaces, dominated by Dell Magazines — the same people who publish Ellery Queen's and Hitchcock's also publish the top two science-fiction magazines, Analog and Asimov's. Both genres are series oriented: if you want to develop a character and write book after book about him, her — or it — you can. Both are convention-driven businesses: just as there are lots of mystery conventions, so, too, there are lots of science-fiction conventions. And both are research-driven genres. You can't write a really good mystery without doing lots of research; the same is true of science fiction. My advice for those wanting to break into science fiction is the same advice I'd give for those wanting to break into mystery: start with short fiction, then try to sell a novel. And, just as in mystery, I'd say the greenest pastures are in New York; don't be afraid to tackle the American market, and don't worry about your Canadian content — I've never had the slightest problem selling flagrantly Canadian work in the States.

Read the rest of Robert J. Sawyer's interview here: Fingerprints Interview of Robert Sawyer.

Credits: "From the December 1997 issue of Fingerprints, the newsletter of the Crime Writers of Canada. Interview conducted in November 1997 by Jim McBride."

Walter Benjamin's Advice To Writers

Brain Pickings is one of my favorite blogs.

Not all the articles are about writing--though many are--but all the posts are valuable, often surprising, and always interesting.

Take, for instance, Maria Popova's lovely piece, Advice on Writing.

First, one's eye falls on a miscellany of advice. The quotation that caught my eye was from Stephen King, "Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."

In other words, write the first draft for yourself, write the second with the knowledge it will be read by strangers, some of your friends and, possibly, your mother.

Maria also tells us that in 1928 essayist Walter Benjamin gave writers the following advice:

(The following are loose paraphrases. Very loose.)

2. Don't read what you've just written.

If you reread what you've written it is inevitable you'll hate it and want to rewrite it, to fiddle with it, pushing words around on paper, changing them. The only result will be that all impulsiveness, all life, will bleed out, leaving it with the uniqueness and interest of a cardboard box.

Be bold. Be different.

Have a reason for every change, not just a vague feeling.

3. Seek out the right writing environment for you.

Sound matters. Some of us need complete silence, others prefer a babble of noise like what we get writing in our favorite coffee shop.

Others must have music. The rhythm of it can help us inhabit a scene--driving music for tense action, calmer, moodier songs for sequels, scenes where our characters pause and reflect on what they are doing and why they are doing it.

And many of us aren't any one way but prefer to flit between musical identities, between writing environments, preferring complete quiet one day while the next we curl up in a coffee shop and let the soft babbling murmur of our fellow patrons wash over us like an ocean swell.

4. The magic of habit.

If you write

a) in the same place using
b) the same materials (laptop or pen and paper, whatever you're used to)
c) at the same time

it will be that much easier to do it again and that much harder not to do it.

By doing the same things over and over you'll form a habit. Writing habits are wonderful things!

5. Write your ideas down.

If you have an idea for a story, a scene, a character, write it down.

If you hear a word you'd like to use, write it down.

If you see a dessert in the window one of your characters would love (or hate), take a picture. (Pinterest can be a great way of keeping track of research photos.) (see: Using Pinterest To Help Build Your Fictional Worlds)

If you hear a song one of your characters would love (or hate) record a snippet of it so you can find out, later, which song it is and put it with your other research. (see: How To Create And Maintain The Habit Of Writing)

7. Before you sit down to write decide how long you'll write for.

Write to the end of the appointed time. If no idea comes to you, work on describing the items you have at hand: your keyboard, your mouse. Your cat.

Or do a writing exercise.

Don't stop writing before the appointed time.

Walter Benjamin's advice appeared in an essay entitled "Post No Bills" and was part of the book One-Way Street. The essays in this book have since been re-published in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings.

# # #

What advice would you give to new writers?

Sunday, April 21

How To Create A Villain Your Readers Will Love To Hate

Have you ever had the experience of suddenly seeing something everywhere after you begin studying it? Of having something 'on your mind'?

That's what's happening to me with antagonists/villains.

A few days ago Larry Brooks wrote an excellent article, The Flipside of Hero Empathy, about the importance of crafting an antagonist your readers love to hate, and how that generates narrative drive. I thought it was brilliant so I'm sharing it with you. It's all about the basics of the craft, but those are strangely easy to forget.

Empathy

"Your reader needs to feel something for your hero."

We know this. We want our readers to care intensely about our protagonist and about whether he/she will achieve his/her goal.

Dramatic Tension

The antagonist is "the obstacle to the hero's question. Therefore a good antagonist will help build dramatic tension or what I call narrative drive.

The Antagonist

The antagonistic force tries to prevent the protagonist from acquiring his/her goal, often because the antagonist wants it, or something it would lead directly to.

Also, the antagonist is often very much like the protagonist but with one crucial difference. For instance, Luke and Darth Vader were both strong in The Force and both trained as Jedi Knights. One could say that they both wanted what was best but they had very different ideas about what that was.

Similarly, Dr. Belloq was Indiana Jones's antagonist in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They were both archaeologists, they were both passionate about finding and bringing back relics and they both liked Marion Ravenwood, Indiana's old flame. The big difference? People were more important to Indie than relics.

Empathy & Narrative Drive/Dramatic Tension

Larry Brooks holds that if readers have both a) empathy for your protagonist and b) a strong desire to see the antagonist get what's coming to him (/go down in flames) then your story will have oodles and oodles of narrative drive, that couldn't-put-it-down-if-they-tried quality which most of us would like our stories to have.

After all, if readers desperately not only want the hero to achieve his/her goal but want the antagonist to go down in flames then they will keep turning pages until that happens.

The Following

Larry Brooks writes:

I mention this killer (literally) television program [The Following] because it offers one of the most compelling, interesting and deliciously hateable villains, maybe ever.

I haven't watched this series yet, though it's on my to-do list.

Which antagonist(s) do you love to hate?

Saturday, April 20

Joe Konrath Is Having A 99 Cent Sale

Joe Konrath writes:

One of the biggest reasons I wanted to regain control over my legacy books was so I had say-so over the price. I felt that publishers price ebooks too high.

. . . .
For the next three days, my Jack Daniels, Jack Kilborn, and sci-fi books will each be 99 cents (with the exception of AFRAID, which is free 4/19 - 4/23).

This sale ends at the stroke of midnight Sunday night (April 21, 2013).

For more information, click here: Joe Konrath's 99 Cent Sale.

Dean Wesley Smith Writes A Novel In 10 Days

Writing A Novel In 10 Days

That's right. Dean Wesley Smith is writing a novel in 10 days!

If you're boggled by that--and I was the first time I read it--Dean discusses what he calls "fast writing" here: Writing Fast.

In Writing Fast, Dean says he believes that "the quality of the final product has no relationship to the speed, method, or feeling of the writer while writing." Therefore whether he took a year to finish the book or only 10 days, the quality would be the same.

But not only is he going to write the novel in 10 days he is also going to only do one draft. He writes:

I hope to write the book (70,000 words) in 7 to 10 days and then turn it in to the publisher. One draft. (The Ghost Novel Writing Is On For Next Week)

To find out about Dean's views on Rewriting see Rewriting Part Two.

How One Professional Writer Prepares To Write A Novel

In his first log I noticed Dean talked a bit about how he gets organized to write a novel and that's something I've always wanted to hear more about from established writers.

Dean's writing computer is different from his internet computer

Dean has different computers for writing and internet related activities. His writing computer (he has discussed this in other posts) isnt' conneted to the internet so answering email, surfing the web, and so on, won't be a temptation.

I think this is a brilliant idea.

Chapter templates

Dean writes,

1:45 PM… Moved to my writing computer, set up files, set up a chapter template since I keep a different file for every chapter and combine them at the end, then typed in a title, typed in the main character’s name and started writing.

That's interesting, using a different file for each chapter. I do something similar, but with the help of Scrivener. I've found that having each scene on its own makes structuring and organizing a novel easier.

For instance, sometimes I will write a scene two different ways in an attempt to discover which feels truer to the story and being able to label them "Act 2 Scene 3 Version 1" and "Act 2 Scene 3 Version 2" helps enormously.

Background Information

Dean writes:

5:05 PM… Moved over to my writing computer from my internet computer and decided that before I went too far I needed to start a glossary of terms, character dress, place names and such, so I set that up and put in it the little bits I had done in the first 500 words.

- glossary of terms
- character dress (perhaps character names as well plus tags and traits)
- place names

That's straightforward.

No Outline

Perhaps I'm burying the lead, but I found it interesting that Dean didn't create an outline previous to sitting down to write.

At least, that's what it seems. He writes:

1:45 PM… Moved to my writing computer, set up files, set up a chapter template since I keep a different file for every chapter and combine them at the end, then typed in a title, typed in the main character’s name and started writing. I have no idea where this book is going, but to start I paid attention to making up some setting through the character’s eyes and opinions. [Emphasis mine]

And

At this point at 4:26 in the morning, I’m at 7,625 words for the day. I could go a little farther but this is a ton better than I had hoped for the first day so I’m going to stop and go downstairs with my cat and veg out on some stupid television.

I still have no idea at all where this book is going. Just making it up as I go. But at the same time I’m feeling no worry at the moment either. I have a hunch that will come. (grin) [Emphasis mine]

I guess I'm a plotter rather than a pantser because I'm getting a nervous tick just thinking about sitting down to write a novel in 10 days without an outline!

I'm eagerly looking forward to following Dean's progress. It's not often--in fact, hardly ever--that one gets to look over an authors shoulder as they write. This will be interesting. I just wish I could read the book at the end!

Friday, April 19

How To See Through Your Character's Eyes

When we're using a point-of-view character we know what they know. We see what they see. We hear what they hear.

But what a character notices will depend on what kind of person they are.

As a result, what a character pays attention to will give us a wealth of information about them. For instance, what sounds irritate her, what scents tantalize? When she walks through a park what will she notice first, the beautiful scenery (is she a photographer?) or the children running around (does she desperately want kids?).

As Kami McArthur writes in David Farland’s Daily Kick in the Pants—Tightening Your Focus:

When you’re writing a tale, it almost always turns out better if you get deep into the head of your protagonist and tell the story from that person’s point of view.

But how do we get inside a characters head? Kami has a few pointers.

1. Determine your characters dominant sense

I've heard that each of us has a dominant sense that they use when learning. For example it's said this is how it breaks down:

25-30% visual
25-30% auditory
15% tactile/kinesthetic
25-30% mixed modalities

How does your character learn? Through seeing? Hearing? Touch?

If they are a visual learner then when you use this character's point of view the visual properties of the environment should dominate. If auditory then the auditory properties, and so on. (Apparently some folks learn most by smell. Who knew?!)

This also provides yet another way to differentiate characters.

Kami gives a terrific example:

... I had a companion who remembered people’s cars. If someone had a red 72 Chevy, he’d see the car in a parking lot and say, “Hey, there’s John Thomas!” Then I would look up, and John was nowhere to be seen. I recall vividly one day how he began naming off people and saying, “There’s John, and the Metzgers, and the Sally Day, and . . .” I looked up eagerly, and there wasn’t a single person on the street. He named a dozen people just by looking at their cars.

2. A characters profession will affect what they notice

For instance, Kami writes:

As a corrections officer, I always made note of unlocked gates or doors left open when I was driving through town. I’d watch strangers to see how they moved, where they put their hands. I’d be careful when walking into restaurants, making sure to place my back to a wall and give myself a clear field of view to see who had enter.

3. Your character will have certain criteria for judging others

Your character may not be self-aware enough to know they have criteria, but we all do, even when we try not to. Does your character focus on:

makeup,

clothes,

social-economic status,

what a person does for a living,

how much money they make,

what kind of car they drive,

who they know,

whether they're good at their job,

intelligence,

grammar,

speech patterns,

whether someone is environmentally conscious, and so on.

Kami writes:

A young woman may judge a new girl by her designer labels, or her hair, rather than her friendliness and her smile. A young man may only be interested in befriending another boy if he thinks that the boy would be an asset to the football team. A third person may avoid people who are wealthy, while a fourth might gravitate toward people who have a strong sense of humor.

4. What specific knowledge does your character have?

What can your character do well? What are they an expert in? Kami gives the example of a young parent.

These are the kinds of things a young parent would be able to tell you:

- Where the baby is
- How many diapers they have and where they are
- When the baby wakes, when they sleep, when they want to play
- What they liked to eat

The same sort of thing applies to a chef, or a hunter, or a police person. They would each pay attention to different things, notice different things, so if you described the same scene from four different perspectives you would learn something different each time.

I've only skimmed the wealth of information in Kami McArthur's article, I encourage all of you to head over to David Farland's site and read it.

# # #

I don't usually dedicate my blog posts to anyone, but I'm dedicating this one to the people of Boston. My heart goes out to them and to the families and friends of those injured or dead. They have become a brilliant example for all of us on how to handle a crisis.

50 Shades Of Grey: The Most Profitable Books Of All Time?

Love it or hate it, E.L. Jame's 50 Shades of Grey series is a huge economic success.

I knew that. We all knew that.

What I didn't know was how profitable.

In The Incredible Economics of Fifty Shades of Grey Kevin Rose writes:

It's no secret that E.L. James's Fifty Shades trilogy is the kind of monster publishing success that comes along only once or twice a decade. ....

. . . .
But we didn't know the full extent of the Fifty Shades financial bonanza until yesterday, when Random House's parent company--the giant German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG--released its preliminary annual report. What the report revealed is that Fifty Shades's success has propped up not just Random House, but the entire corporate structure above it. [Emphasis mine]

Wow.

The Wall Street Journal has this to say:

At a time when other publishers are struggling to generate sales growth, Random House's world-wide revenue rose 23% to €2.1 billion ($2.7 billion). Operating earnings before interest and taxes rose nearly 76% to €325 million.

Fifty Shades vs Harry Potter

For all its success, E.L. James's series has yet to outsell J.K. Rowling's Potter series. Yes, Fifty Shades has outsold Harry Potter on Amazon, but according to The Wall Street Journal its worldwide sales are still lower.

Let me try to put that in perspective.

E.L. James's "Fifty Shades" erotic trilogy sold more than 70 million copies in print, audio and e-book editions in English, German and Spanish from March through December, according to Bertelsmann ... The first of the books was published in the U.S. in March.

. . . .
For a sense of scale, Random House's second biggest selling North American title last year—Gillian Flynn's thriller "Gone Girl," which has been a national best-seller for 41 weeks—sold more than two million copies in the U.S. and Canada in all formats, between June and December. (The Wall Street Journal)

50 Shades sold 70 million copies while the second most popular book in the same period sold 2 million.

I'm staggered.

70 million in just a year. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code sold, as of 2009, 80 million copies, but that was over a period of six years (the book was published in 2003).

By the way, The Da Vinci Code was published by Doubleday in the US and, at that time, Doubleday was owned by Bertelsmann.

That company has been lucky!

To answer the question I posed in the title: Is 50 Shades of Grey the most profitable series of all time? No, it's not.

Not yet.

Do you think E.L. James' 50 Shades series will go on to outsell Rowling's Potter series?

Pages

Wednesday, April 24

Building A Press Kit: Author Information

1. Author biography

2. Contact information

3. Press release

4. Sample author Q&A

Building A Press Kit: Book Information

Book sample

Cover image

Where the book can be found on the web

Sample reviews

The books "one line"

Brief Book Summary

Longer Book summary

Example of a press kit

Other articles you might like:

Tuesday, April 23

Other articles you might like:

Rick Daley: How To Write A Critique

Other articles you might like:

Monday, April 22

How Robert Sawyer creates his characters

Robert Sawyer's advice for aspiring science fiction authors:

Other articles you might like:

2. Don't read what you've just written.

3. Seek out the right writing environment for you.

4. The magic of habit.

5. Write your ideas down.

7. Before you sit down to write decide how long you'll write for.

Other articles you might like:

Sunday, April 21

Empathy

Dramatic Tension

The Antagonist

Empathy & Narrative Drive/Dramatic Tension

The Following

Other articles you might like:

Saturday, April 20

Other links you might like:

Writing A Novel In 10 Days

How One Professional Writer Prepares To Write A Novel

Dean's writing computer is different from his internet computer

Chapter templates

Background Information

No Outline

Other articles you might like:

Friday, April 19

1. Determine your characters dominant sense

2. A characters profession will affect what they notice

3. Your character will have certain criteria for judging others

4. What specific knowledge does your character have?

Other articles you might like:

Fifty Shades vs Harry Potter

Other articles you might like: