Pages
Posts by category
- Category: Blog
- Not Homophobic, We are Homophonic
- Being Creative: Using Commas
- Sneaking in Background Information without Derailing the Story
- Happy New Year, Dear Authors!
- Casting Light in the Heart of Writerly Darkness
- Good Writing = Judicious Cutting
- Strategies for Writing about Painful Experiences
- Vacation time warp: Reading like it’s 1993?
- Going on a Writing Vacation
- Want to Portray Evil? Keep Your Distance.
- The Me in Memoir Does not Mean the Book is Only about You
- “Drowning” in Quotes; Please “Save” Us
- Prologues: When What Comes Before Really Belongs Inside
- Omniscient Point of View: Being God-like is a Tough Choice for Modern Writers
- Writing in the Second and Third Persons
- Hearing Voices: Which One Will You Choose for your Novel?
- A New Year’s toast to you, our authors!
- Seeding Your Story to Make it Bloom
- When It Comes to Writing Technique, One Size Does Not Fit All
- Coming up: Author Intrusions
- Smile…and it Could Kill You
- Book Dialogue is More Than Just Talk
- Writing a book? Okay, it’s Show Time!
- Leaving Out What Readers Skip: Elmore Leonard
- The Successful Query Promotes the Book, not the Author
- Writing’s Empty Calories; Put your Narrative on a Diet
- Bringing Characters to Life in the Mind of the Reader
- Going the Distance: Stepping Back to Revise your Writing Work
- Filling in the Background without Derailing the Story
- Reader, Oh Reader, Where Art Thou?
- Looking for the Story in Your Memoir
- ADD Characters? Or Overzealous Writing?
- Writing a Book is More Than Paragraphs Strung Together: Make a Scene
- Promoting Your eBook Means Getting Reviewed
- Power to the People, Authors, That Is
- The Secret Life of (Key)words
- How to Write from Multiple Points of View When You Are Really Writing from One
- Ups and Downs of Writing and Publishing
- Stone bluff, Camp Fire: Setting the Scene
- Avoiding “Picasso-style” Writing to Say What You Mean – Vonnegut
- Kid Lit: Advice from a Published Children’s Author
- Structuring Your Story: Get Out the Picnic Table
- Going to Lose Ten Pounds Worth of Words: New Year’s Writing Resolutions
- A New Year’s toast to you, our authors!
- Comfort and Community: The Power of Words
- Plot Development: Confusing is not the Same as Mysterious
- Putting on Your Writing Skin to find your Narrative Voice
- Never Leave Them Laughing: Learning How to Build Suspense from a Master
- Expletive Deleted! We’re talking sentences, not words.
- When the storm of life takes on a life of its own…
- Style Creep, Keeping your Voice Pure
- Are we there yet?
- Bringing Characters to Life by Studying the Master
- A Glimpse of Stocking – and what it reveals about a character
- Story Core: At the Heart of Every Good Book is a Story(ies)
- Participial-ation, making those sentences flow…
- T-participial-rex, dinosaur
- First and Last Lines – and the World in Between
- Famous Last Words: We’re Outta Here
- Voices in Space: When Book Characters Don’t Have Bodies
- When is it time to give up on traditional publishing and self-publish?
- Dear Writer…Dear Writer…Dear Writer…Dear W…
- Gotta Dash
- Twit Lit
- What’s All the Comma-tion?
- Skip the explanations; just tell the story
- Realish-ism: new literary genre or dancing around the truth?
- The Tortoise and the Binge-Writer, Race to Deadline
- Think you have written a memorable line? Put it to the test:
- The Nov-oir: is this what it is coming to?
- Book Tour via Twitter
- The (Neuro) Science of Good Writing
- Nasty Little Birds, a Little Madness, and Perpetual Astonishment. Oh yeah, Spring
- Making a list can be lazy writing unless you are going grocery shopping
- Saying things twice and being redundant: Cut it out!
- What writing love scenes can teach you about writing ordinary advance-the-plot scenes
- How writing fiction exposes the writer
- When times get tough, the tough get…writing
- The Tiger, poster child for literary symbolism
- Death comes to Pemberly, but the market for Jane lives on
- Hats off to you, our authors, in 2012!
- Good tidings: how e books may be changing the marketplace for writers
- Other people in my memoir? What other people? Isn’t it about me?
- Opening for a great Washington, DC, novel; no need to apply, just go to work
- When Thanksgiving-the-holiday was new and writers were inspired by it…
- If you can cut it, you probably don’t need it: meaningless phrases
- Short sentences can open the door to the imagination; they can also close it
- Five parts terror, three parts horror with a dash of repulsion….
- How to How-to: Know Your Reader
- The Staying Power of Books
- Dear reader, the most verstile straight man ev-er
- How much would? We would chuck.
- Getting the novel you are writing from A to B
- Long Sentences: popular with writers, with readers, not so much
- Telling the reader what happens next can build suspense. Really.
- When you are reminded (and reminded) the book is fiction but can’t help believing it is fact: metafiction meets realism
- The real, historical guy behind a fictional bit part
- Writing a novel that changes the world: the vision(s) thing
- The vernacular of fiction – and we thought we were being creative!
- The Future of Publishing: Bleak or Rosy?
- Book length: how long is too long?
- The baggage of writing; can’t we just do it for fun?
- Setting the scene in a novel: you have to do it again and again and again
- Good Reasons to Listen to Your Writing
- THE PERFECT STORM, INTO THIN AIR, THE WORST HARD TIME: What makes some non-fiction so suspenseful?
- Writing Spaces: A room with a view – or not
- Fictional Real Estate: location, location, and yes, location
- The tyranny of book proposals: some guesses about where they came from but no excuses…
- What makes a good memoir? Does your life qualify?
- Book blooper: the impossible narrator
- Are you telling a story or trying to show the reader how smart you are?
- It takes more than imagination to come up with the good stuff
- Being more fully present by being absent: a lesson from a poet
- Advice from the experts: writers on writing
- Writing nice when niceness isn’t cool
- Spring cleaning: cobwebs and clutter to eliminate from your manuscript.
- If you are going to kill off characters, have the decency to mark their passing.
- Maintaining interest while you interrupt yourself: making flashbacks work
- Characters we don’t love to hate
- Good brother; not-so-good brother: thinking about literary themes
- Writing formula: 0% inspiration, 100% concentration
- Writers who don’t trust their readers are unlikely to have any.
- Readers are yahoos. Yes, that means you and gulp, us too.
- In honor of the new season of Dexter…endorsing the serial comma.
- Watch out! Serial commas, errant colons, and slipped ellipses are on the loose; it is National Punctuation Day…
- In singing, the head voice and the chest voice. In writing too?
- The Franzen hype: good for American writers
- Eat, pray, (think) write…
- Shakespeare and an Inspiration for Writing
- "I would of done that."
- Great Expectations – The Comic Book?
- Writing Well: Not just for Novels
- “Publication – is the auction of the Mind of Man.”
- Where do the words come from?
- The danger (and joy) of politics in the novel
- The Trouble with Knocking off Jane
- Is blogging writing or avoiding writing?
- Got the bourbon for my sore back, switching into first person: #amwriting
- Unrealized expectations – when the novel flops
- What the dragon tattoo says about the girl
- Keeping the characters straight when writing from multiple viewpoints
- The Novel as Video Game
- The College Intern's take on Procrastination
- The Generation Y Writing Style
- Writing is not what happens in the moment
- The Estival Calefaction is Getting to Us – Time to Put the Thesaurus Away!
- Building suspense, what Facebook can teach us
- Synonyms are beautiful, as well as admirable, alluring, angelic, appealing, beauteous, bewitching, charming, classy, comely, cute, dazzling, delicate, delightful, divine, elegant, enticing, excellent, exquisite, fair, fascinating, fine, good-looking, gorgeous, graceful, grand, handsome, ideal, lovely, magnificent, marvelous, nice, pleasing, pretty, pulchritudinous, radiant, ravishing, refined, resplendent, shapely, sightly, splendid, statuesque, stunning, sublime, superb, symmetrical, taking, well-formed, wonderful
- Writing your how-to book; it is not about you.
- The importance of words from a man who is losing them
- The interrobang. You cannot be serious?!
- Exclamation Marks: One is always enough and even then…
- A monologue that doesn’t drone on – too much
- Robert Frost and Writing Places
- You don’t have to rewrite with a toothbrush
- Scare Quotes: Aghhhhhhhhh!
- Dexter and the point of view problem
- Details, Details – Don’t skip them
- Writing without a net
- There is nothing short about writing a short story
- The ultimate judge – you
- Writing a memoir is tantamount to writing a work of fiction these days.
- Formatting is not Writing
- The manipulative narrator, is it okay to deliberately mislead readers?
- Falling for an unlikely Protagonist
- Point of View – Mixing it Up
- Omniscient Point of View: It is hard being God-like
- He, she, it and they: third persons
- The Strange You –More of a Cautionary Tale
- Me, Me, Me – the I Voice
- The View From Here
- The Search for Writing Voice can Yield Many Voices
- Whose Voice is This?
- Book Dialogue is NOT Talk
- Writing for Immortality – or Not
- Showing Versus Telling, the Horror of it
- Book Characters are People Too
- What The Ghost Writer says about Ghostwriting
- Novel Characters Should Not Know Anything – Ever
- Skipping out on the Ending – Don’t
- Show…and Tell
- Showing, Instead of Telling
- A Novel within a Series of Stories
- The Economy of Dickens
- Exclusivity versus Multiple Submissions
- A Query Letter Should be a Tease
- Why We Love Writers
- You Loved the Book, Do You Want to Know the Author?
- Salinger on Reading to Write
- The Power of a Pronoun
- Words, Words, Words
- At Publishing Houses, Editors are Dinosaurs
- The Kindest Cuts
- Category: Client Gallery
- Category: Page
Client Gallery