writing tips
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Editing 101 and Tips From The Best Editors
If you thought that it only takes a writer and a publishing house to get a book on the store shelves, then you are terribly wrong. There is another important person, called an editor, who refined and polishes the text and directs the focus of the story along with a certain course. An editor cuts what is not necessary to the story, enhances the critical points and draws attention to where the reader should focus. After the editor’s job is done, the book or article will be clean, strong, appealing and professional. Why is an editor so important, you might wonder? Can’t I edit my own writing? As a writer,…
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Book reviews for YA authors
In 2015 I mostly helped indie authors publish and market their books – but in 2016 I want to focus on writing my own. I’m doing a big launch for Shearwater, the first segment of a YA mermaid romance novel and I’ve been doing everything I can to launch with a bang. I talk a lot about book marketing on my main site, www.creativindie.com, like how I built a list of 8500+ YA readers in 2 weeks with book giveaways. It’s fun to try new things that other authors aren’t doing yet, but it remains to be seen whether my books will “stick” and keep selling even when I stop promoting.…
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Do you really need an editor for your book?
I started an editing company when I was working on my MA in Literature. Then I started another one when I began my PhD. I’m pretty awesome at editing books, but up until recently I hadn’t written my own fiction. Now that I’m almost done with my first book, I’ve learned a few things about the writing process. But the biggest thing I learned, is that most authors are telling stories that don’t matter. Most authors approach writing like a sandbox. They see a nice castle and they try to reconstruct if from memory, or by looking at it, with their hands. They poke fingers for windows. They dribble sand…
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Brick by Brick: The Value of Writing Exercises
If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health. – Hippocrates Exercise can easily be defined as something one has to do in order to improve oneself in a particular area. That sounds rather broad, so to put it into perspective, we do physical exercise in order to keep fit and healthy, we exercise proper hygiene in order to stay clean, we exercise discipline in order to keep our lives and our affairs in order. And, of course, if we are writers, we have a few exercises we perform to…
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What’s the Next Step?: Knowing What to Do With Your Writing
So you’re done with writing your piece. What next? The answer may sound easy, but the path that you undertake to get to wherever you want to get definitely isn’t. There are a lot of options that you can choose from after finishing your piece (for the sake of this article, let us assume that it is your first draft). It is important that you should know what your options are, and where these may lead you. There is one very, very important step that you should go through, though, regardless of what you plan to do with your piece: Leave your work alone for a while. Well, it is an option, although it doesn’t sound like something…
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Writing Risks: Why Write Out of Your Comfort Zone
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. – T.S. Eliot The word “risk” may evoke something terrifying, or give a feeling of repulsion. When you say something’s risky, or that undertaking a particular thing is a risk, you can get the impression that the negatives are heavy and substantial that they may possibly – probably – balance out, or even outweigh, the positives of a particular undertaking. “Too risky” would mean the odds are stacked against you, and therefore undertaking a particular activity may just be your downfall. Sometimes risks are worth taking, but then it takes some sort of…
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Chasing Dreams: The Importance of Inspiration
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. – Jack London The quote from Jack London seems terrifyingly aggressive, but rather fitting. Artists of all kinds – writers, musicians, and painters, to name a few – often owe much of their work to muses, or inspirations. And inspiration comes in all shapes, sizes, and forms, often elusive, often ephemeral, always hitting you in the head when it comes and drilling an idea that festers under your skin until you actually work on it. And the argument is that inspiration comes when it comes – which, as the quote has already pointed out, can be…
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Keeping Focus In Writing
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Keeping Focus In Writing
Writers have the interesting – sometimes productive, sometimes just plain bad – habit of thinking of a lot of ideas that can be penned down and used for later. In other words, really, there are a million worlds running through a writer’s head, and they’re just dying to be written. It’s fun, of course, especially if you go through a rather productive brainstorming session when you’re looking for a new project to work on. It’s a blessing when you’re looking for those ideas. It’s a curse when you’re midway through a story idea and something else tries to grab your attention. While it’s not necessarily wrong to juggle several writing projects at…
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The Importance of Writing Breaks
It’s pretty easy to get carried away when it comes to writing. A lot of authors agree that writing is a largely solitary act, one that hinges prominently on the writer and what the writer knows – or is trying to make up – and how the writer can deliver these pieces of knowledge. Of course, the idea of co-authorship or interpretation comes into play, when the reader steps in. But before that part of the process, the writer has to focus on actually writing. The tendency, then, is to keep the self isolated from all forms of distracting activity, people, or an environment that’s not conducive to writing. At…
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From inspiration to idea: how to find the write topic for your book
You can write an article here…
