Category: How To and Tips
As an Author, Do You Need an Intern?
An ‘intern’ is the new literary or arts apprentice which is more skilled than ‘work experience’. And some can be VIRTUAL interns, working from anywhere. ‘Self –employment’ is an increasingly important choice for creatives and our culture needs more entrepreneurs AND authorpreneurs. Until now, I’ve avoided having an intern. Despite requests to provide work-experience for […]
In Defense of Head-Hopping
In writing, head hopping is defined as using an omniscient third-person narrator to hop from the head of one character right into another. This is thought to cause confusion for the reader and leave them wondering whose thoughts they’re supposed to follow now. I understand that the idea of keeping a sharp line between the […]
How to write good, realistic dialogue
Best-selling novelist Isabel Wolff offers her tips on how to write good, realistic dialogue. Dialogue is what happens when two or more characters talk to each other. We’ve all read novels in which that conversation is conveyed very awkwardly and this clumsiness pulls us out of the book. Good dialogue, on the other hand, is […]
What to do when the fire of your first draft has gone out
“Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the […]
How to Break Up with your Novel
To begin with, let me clarify: I don’t mean abandon your novel; I mean separate yourself from it. This has to happen eventually. For better or worse the novel you’ve written will come to term, and it will have to live (or not live) on its own, away from you. There may be any number […]
The Unnoticed Writer
Over the last couple of days there’s been fair amount of buzz around the fiction writer Edith Pearlman. Her “break-out” story collection, Honeydew, is forthcoming from Little, Brown & Company. Pearlman is 78, and has published a number of story collections with small presses. In 2011, her collection Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories earned […]
How to be More Productive
I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing productivity and questioning my daily routine. I picked up Daily Rituals: How Artists Work from the library because like the author, Mason Currey, I want to know how great artists organize their days in order to be creative and productive. Currey does not pretend to offer certainties […]
Mistakes to avoid in Short Story Writing
As the fiction editor for Eclectica Magazine, it’s been both a privilege and pleasure to read story submissions. Finding the handful of pieces that take my breath away is what it’s all about. The good ones shine through, those that are brilliant positively sparkle. That said, it’s too bad that so many stories that come […]
Six top tips for writing historical fiction
I love writing fiction set in the Twentieth Century. My first book, The Separation, published by Penguin, takes place during the 1950s, the second The Tea Planter’s Wife, Penguin 2015, explores the 1920s and 1930s and the third kicks off in 1940s Vietnam when it was part of Indochina. Here I share the tips I’ve […]
What Do You Mean I Have to Market My Writing?
We all start with different decks. Some with no cards. Some with no money. Some not even at the table. It’s not fair. There’s nothing fair about it. Maybe it will never be fair. But if you want to play, if I want to play, whatever odds I was given, them’s the odds I got. […]
Recent Comments