Tag: writing tips

Telling a story—delivering a narrative—is just as important in creative nonfiction, academic writing, marketing writing, business writing, and any other kind of technical writing, as it is in fiction.

Weapons can really amp up fight scenes, but make sure you're using them right in your story to keep readers turning pages.

As a professional author, you can take critique and do many things with it, but here are several ways to interpret notes you receive from your beta readers, alpha readers, or editors.

Self-editing is not writing—it’s a completely different skill, and requires a completely different frame of mind. It requires you to look at your work as a reader will, not as the author.

With over a decade’s experience as an editor­—in-house with a corporate publisher and an independent publishing house, and especially as a freelancer working with self-published authors—the skill that I treasure the most is empathy.

Image credit to Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash. Every reader can name the most memorable characters they have met in pages of print. Yet no matter the diversity of genre or age of the works in which these characters appear, each of these characters shares a common quality ̶ the ability to successfully lay claim to … Continue reading Guest Post: What Makes Memorable Characters by Irada Ronalder

What type of editing do you need? It depends on what you want the work to entail.

The convenience fairy is an extremely helpful little sprite that pops up every time the writer writes themselves into a pickle or when the writer realizes they’ve just stepped into a New York-sized plot hole.

Image credit to Steve Johnson on Unsplash. I’d like to talk about the dreaded writer’s block. I know some have some very strong opinions on how “real” this particular phenomenon is, but as someone who is no stranger to the terror of staring down a blank page, I do believe that some of us do … Continue reading Guest Post: Coping with Writer’s Block by Sara Potter

Only budgeting out time for the drafting process means your leaving out some important parts: pre-writing and revision, which are interconnected and crucial to how polished of a product your book becomes.