Tag: featured
How to Prevent Your Characters from All Sounding the Same
At the start of my career I had a book rejected because the commissioning editor didn’t feel my characters were ‘coming across’. I think she was trying to find a polite way of saying they were flat and dull – ‘cardboard’ characters, if you like – which is about the worst thing you can say […]
Yoda Versus The Muse
Let me get to the guts of this right away: I don’t believe in the Muse. Or in her more earthly cousin, Inspiration. I’ve written four novels (I sold three and used one for parts without showing it to anyone), and not one was powered by any outside force. I spent no time staring at […]
When The Words Won’t Come
Sometimes I can’t stop writing. Sometimes the words tumble out of me like some writhing, living beast that refuses to be contained. Where the story emerges, almost unbidden, and it’s all I can do for my fingers to keep up with the rapid pace of my mind. Suddenly the dreaded white page is covered in […]
How Your Day Job Can Help Your Writing
I’m lucky to live in a writer’s city, full of writing friends. Every so often we meet, drink cheap wine, bounce ideas around, and complain about our day jobs. We apply together for writing fellowships, arts grants, writing sabbaticals, writing retreats. All in quest of the time to write that our jobs, just ruining everything, […]
Nonlinear Narratives – Tips & Tricks
Have you ever finished a chapter in one character’s point of view only to find the next chapter is written from somebody else’s perspective? Me too, and these mini cliff-hangers compel us to keep reading. Nonlinear narratives – stories where events don’t happen in chronological order – do this too. They are extremely useful for […]
Writing Past the “Happily Ever After”
There’s an image I remember from a movie I watched as a child, of a princess looking across the sea at a castle on a mountain, her soon-to-be home with the prince of her dreams. With that scene, the movie ended, but my contemplating had just begun. What happens now, I wondered. How do the […]
Why Won’t (Insert Name Here) Read My Book?
So you wrote the book, which is an amazing accomplishment. You published the book, which is another accomplishment. You also dug in and did your marketing homework and set up a great plan to connect with those readers, and began to get some good reviews, and began to get some sales. Now comes the part […]
Eight Ways To Make Your Writing Funnier
“If someone gets a lot of LOLs on their Facebook statuses, do you think they could be a comedy writer? Asking for a friend.” If someone asked me that, I’d go to their Facebook feed and read where theses LOLs were coming from. Of course, his mother. But then I’d cut him a break because […]
The Trouble With Writing About Family
Let us take a tiny moment from our otherwise busy day to think how difficult it must be to be related to a writer. We are not easy people, after all. Many of us are perhaps a bit moody, tense and insecure, and possibly have a slight tendency to scribble dialogue or check our Amazon […]
Q&A with Tiffany McDaniel
Tiffany McDaniel writes with a wholly original beauty that is rarely seen. Arresting. Disquieting. Luminous. This is a sample of reviews from readers. There are a thousand more like them. “I think something deep in my soul has shifted after reading this book. My gut is still churning after turning the final page 2 days […]
Recent Comments