Publishing Services for Independent Authors
Editing your own work is a minefield of decisions, your map to safety cobbled together by tips and rules from a dozen different sources. Getting to the other side and publishing your book depends on hundreds of small choices, and it’s easy to find yourself halfway through a project, doubting every choice you’ve made so far and unsure how to go on. It’s useful, then, to understand a little …
[Read more...] about The Word ‘They’ Can Improve How You Self-Edit
What would have happened if Tolkien crammed the entire contents of The Silmarillion into a prologue to The Lord of the Rings? Many Middle-earth fans find it hard enough to slog through The Silmarillion’s 500 pages of mythopoetic history; there’s no way most first-time readers would make it to the Shire, much less out of it, if all this backstory came at the beginning of the better-known trilogy. …
[Read more...] about 4 Signs Your Backstory Is Upstaging Your Real Story
All art is political, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The way in which we believe the world to work – the way we think it should work – has a natural part to play in both our creation of fictional worlds and how we depict our own. The connection between art and politics is natural, but it runs deep, and that means that your political beliefs often influence your art in ways you don’t …
[Read more...] about How To Manage The Politics Of Your Writing
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. – W. Somerset Maugham Do you cringe at always/never/only advice for writers like I do? Advice like this butts up against two of life’s most important guidelines: Never say ‘never,’ and never say ‘always.’ Great things are usually great because they broke the rules and did something new. So, in true …
[Read more...] about 3 Writing Myths You Should Feel Free To Ignore
Melodrama tends to get a bad rep these days, and not without good reason. Certainly, melodrama – that is, sensational drama; exaggerated, flat characters; farcically exciting events; and extreme responses and actions – can often come at the expense of those other aspects of fiction that make your book worth reading: deep characters, subtext, complex plotlines, etc. But it doesn’t have to and, even …
[Read more...] about The Author’s Guide To Melodrama (And What It Can Do For You)
Have you ever read a book where every character – from the six-year-old in pigtails to the wizened sea captain to the stripper – sounds the same? It’s easy for authors to stumble into this mono-tone pitfall. The task of writing a story is already monumental, and adopting a narrative voice appropriate to the story and genre can require monumental effort. Further division of character voices …
[Read more...] about How To Make Sure Your Characters Don’t Speak In The Same Voice
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