Editing - Story Tips - Publishing

How to Avoid & Crush Writer’s Block Silencing the Inner Critic – Overcoming writer’s block sometimes involves shutting up the little green monster that sits on the writer’s shoulder (particularly the beginning writer) telling them that everything they write is stupid, and that they’ll never make it as a writer. Find a way to build...

Benefits and Drawbacks of Each POV in Your MS As a beginning writer who chose to write my first book in first-person narrative, I discovered the drawbacks of such an approach the hard way. Halfway through the book, I started all over in third-person – something I wouldn’t recommend. Briefly, Point of View – when...

The Three S’s – Scene, Setting, and Senses Stories don’t occur in a bubble. They have to be set in a real and believable place. And what makes a scene or setting, is detail. And what makes the details, is work. Hard work. A lot of time and effort, in other words. Settings aren’t just...

Should I Use Sentence Fragments? Sentence fragments. Who cares? You? Me? Anyone? Depends. Writing nonfiction? Probably wouldn’t. Work, that is. Writing fiction? Could be. Depends. On what? Style. With some authors? Might work. Others? Not so much. A hundred years ago? Wouldn’t have been acceptable. Writing fragments, that is. Too formal back then. Long run-on...

What is an Adverb?  An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. Here’s some examples: Adjective Form: happy clear close dear perfect Adverb Form: happily clearly closely dearly perfectly Of course, not all adverbs in in ly as the following list demonstrates: quite very much right too never  soon...

How Cliché is Using Clichés in Your Writing? This one’s a tough nut to crack. Avoiding cliches is like avoiding headaches. We’d all love to, but there’s no way we’ll ever completely avoid them. With hundreds of cliches, they’re as thick as pea soup, and therefore, often the first ideas which come to mind. Clichés...

How Many Manuscript Drafts Should You Go Through? When working on a book of any kind, if you haven’t gone through a minimum of three drafts, you probably don’t have a finished product. The first draft should be seen only as an opportunity to articulate and develop ideas in a rough form. This tells you...

Are You Overwhelming Your Readers? Have you ever run across a prologue like this: (usually in sci-fi books) Captain Briggs took the helm and began shouting orders. “Ensign, optimize the traspositional filtration valves to ignite the gravitational destabilizers.” “I can’t do that,” Ensign Scott replied. “If I optimize the filtration valve, the axomital diffusionators will...