You’ve followed your creative urge, spend hour upon hour for months curled over your keyboard pecking out words, paragraphs, and chapters, and you’ve finally finished a novel. You’ve shared your accomplishment with friends and family, and now they’re starting to call you a writer–an author. Maybe you laugh and agree. Or possibly you glow with […]
The Importance of a Story Hook
After months of writing and revising, you’ve finally finished your first novel. You’ve agonized over writing a synopsis and rewritten your query letter a dozen times. Now, your e-mail holds your very first request for a partial manuscript. All that hard work is paying off, and you’re well on your way to publication, right? MAYBE… […]
Keeping Track of the Details
The old saying says that the devil is in the details, meaning that problems in the details can ruin the whole project. When applied to novel-writing, it can refer to the following type of mistakes: – He’s wearing jeans and a Cardinals t-shirt when they leave the house, but camo pants and an Army t-shirt […]
A Word about Suspense
You’ve got a great story idea, characters your readers will love, and a fantastic surprise twist. You can’t wait to start writing and lead your readers along the path of suspense that builds up to the big reveal at some point late in the story. Most of all, it tickles your stomach to think of […]
The School of Hard Knocks
When I first began writing, I had no formal training, just a story to tell and the sense that it needed to be told. God encouraged me through the six months it took to write my first novel, and when I finished the rough draft, I naively thought the hard part was behind me. Instead, […]
Where Does the Story Start?
Every story has a beginning, middle and end. As anyone who has attempted to write a story knows, however, it’s not as simple as starting at the beginning and writing through the middle until you reach the end. In truth, determining the proper place to start the story is one of the author’s hardest tasks. […]
Three low-cost ways to know when your manuscript is “ready”
If you’ve been in the book business any length of time, you’ve seen a manuscript that isn’t ready. It’s not that it couldn’t be whipped into shape. But in its current form, any editor will say “no.” Many new authors don’t know what readiness looks like. They want to submit their work because they’ve finished […]
Four elements that every flash fiction story needs
Sick of writing your novel? Sure, I may be biased since I run Splickety Magazine, a flash fiction publication dedicated to showcasing the country’s best quick fic with kick, but we all know how difficult it can be to finish a novel. The solution? Write some flash fiction (a short story 1,000 words or less). […]