Category: How To and Tips
Writing About Spirituality
When I started on a spiritual path almost thirty years ago, I voraciously read every account of spiritual awakening that I could find. Mind you, there wasn’t an Amazon.com, and I had to go to an actual bookstore to find books in this genre. Mostly I read books about the saints – but then Shirley […]
Exclamation Evolution
I love the exclamation mark. I’ve used it, and fairly regularly, for as long as I can remember. I like how it can signal glee, surprise, bemusement; how it can turn a blunt-sounding sentence (in a text, say) into something softer, something more playful. And I confess I use it in part because I know […]
Sex In Women’s Fiction, Part 3: Advice From The Experts
Part 3 of our Sex In Women’s Fiction Series, Read part 2 HERE It’s surprisingly easy to write bad sex. In fact, cringeworthy sex scenes are so ubiquitous that the UK magazine, Literary Review, hands out an annual award to distinguish the somewhat awful from the truly terrible. According to their website, the purpose of […]
Five Ways to Increase Micro-Tension
How do we keep readers invested in what will happen next? As writers, we want readers on the edge of their seat, even in scenes that don’t justify heart-pounding action. Micro-tension, a term I first encountered in Donald Maass’ The Fire in Fiction, offers a solution. Recently I’ve been working on micro-tension in my own […]
Zombies Ate My Cookbook: How The Undead Inspired Me to Write
“You’re a food nerd and a zombie nerd. You should write a cookbook for the zombie apocalypse.” It was those words, from my dear friend Paul and the best idea man I know, that sparked the inspiration for my first book The Art of Eating Through the Zombie Apocalypse. This was in 2008, and at […]
5 Ways Storytelling Can Improve Healthcare
By Esther Choy, Author of Let the Story Do the Work (published by AMACOM), is now available on major online retail platforms such as Amazon. Humans have a long tradition of literature exploring health. After all, if you own and operate a human body, you’re involved in healthcare. Whether it’s dealing with our own health issues or those of […]
Three’s a Crowd – Writing an Effective Multiple Point of View Novel
Since reading my very first Jodi Picoult novel, I have loved books written in multiple points of view. Everyone has a different opinion of the world and the people in it. Everyone has a different past that has led them to those opinions. And everyone believes they are right about the world from their own […]
Sex In Women’s Fiction, Part 2: Sex Sells (Sometimes)
Part two of our Sex in Women’s Fiction series: Read Part One HERE Before we went out on submission with The Wild Woman’s Guide to Traveling the World, my agent, Jennifer Johnson-Blalock, asked me to make a few revisions. The goal was to make the book stronger and more saleable to readers and publishers alike. […]
The Arduous Search for An Agent
First thing to remember, it doesn’t start with sending out query letters. It starts before that. You finally finish your manuscript, then you re-write it, and you edit it, and you craft it probably more than once. But even before that, if you’re writing a novel or memoir as I have, you have also spent […]
In Defense of Unlikeable Characters- Five Tips to Keep Readers Engaged
It’s a well-known writing tip- your main character should be likeable. Readers enjoy being able to identify with a character, to cheer her on toward her goal. This can be hard to do when they’re unlikable. It’s good advice. However, I keep doing the opposite- I write complicated, messy, often seriously flawed characters. Books like […]
Recent Comments