Straight talk from the sisters about blood, sweat and ink
After watching my writing pal enter the contest this month, I decided I wanted to know more about how successful some of the past winners had been at building careers. Also, I wanted to know what steps a writer could take to improve their odds of winning. As the historian of the Write On Sisters …
Continue reading “Another Look at Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award”
A while ago I wrote about today’s saturated book market and the challenges writers face: getting work noticed and read; earning a living; building a platform so our work can get noticed and read and we can earn a living. It’s kind of a circuitous dance of codependent steps that does this sad shuffle or …
Continue reading “Writing Contests And Awards: Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award”
Working in TV again has reminded me that I write well under the pressure of a deadline. Deadlines force me to stop procrastinating. Deadlines make me write faster. Deadlines keep me off the internet! But what if you have no real deadlines? When story editors, producers and broadcasters are all expecting a script from me …
Continue reading “4 Tricks to Make & Meet Deadlines”
Great books inspire great writing. Without further ado, the novels that push me to be my creative best… SPEAK by Laurie Halse Anderson This is the first YA book I ever bought. I read it yeeeeeears ago, when I was about 22. Though I can’t remember the details, I do remember the issue and …
Continue reading “Friday Inspiration: Seven YA Books that Inspire Me to Write Better”
*In my first novel I must have changed the name of my protagonist ten times and that’s before I wrote a single word! I finally began the first page with a name I thought would serve my character well. However, I hadn’t really met Sarah yet. As I’ve explained in prior posts, my characters take …
Continue reading “Naming your Babies”
Nothing elevates the quintessential protagonist like the perfect sidekick. These secondary characters help showcase the protagonist’s positive and negative traits by contrasting them against the sidekick’s own traits. The bond between these two characters is often a vulnerable relationship. Our good friends always know our darkest history, the secrets we never share with outsiders. At …
Continue reading “Casting Call: 7 Sidekick Archetypes”
Departing for a while from my posts on Cross Training for Writers, I set out to explore the barriers fiction writers must navigate if we’re to tell stories other than our own. So this is less a post about finding solutions than it is about raising questions, the answers to which will be different for …
Continue reading “The Fiction Writer’s Taboos: Are There Any?”
Love is the best reason to live. We love our children, our pets, our partners, and love in its various forms has inspired poets and writers for centuries to do their best work. We hanker after romantic love because there’s nothing quite as exhilarating or fulfilling, so we pursue it, offer and accept it wherever …
Continue reading “What We’re Reading This Month: All About Love And Madness”
Today we kick off the weekend with a Friday inspiration post. During these posts each of us takes turns selecting something that inspires us, and we hope offers inspiration to other writers. I’m showcasing one of my favorite nature writers, John Muir (1838 – 1914) Writer, naturalist, political activist, and Co-founder of the Sierra Club, …
Continue reading “Friday Inspiration: Author John Muir”
I have a new crit partner who just happens to be a line editor and might be a reincarnation of my dreaded high school English teacher, Mrs. Howard, although I’ve never actually met him in person. Mrs. Howard resembled a bag lady and according to urban legend she apparently wound up as one. A ragged …
Continue reading “He Said What? Direct vs. Indirect Speech”