Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 15
Today’s excerpts are from Chapter 5: Realities, Odds, and Other Inconveniences It’s true, we sometimes must kill our darlings. Evolved writers tell us that at some point along the writing road, we will be asked, if not forced, to let go of things we were originally in love with. This refers to specific ideas, sometimes […]
Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 14
Today’s excerpts are from Chapter 5: Realities, Odds, and Other Inconveniences I’m assuming you want to be great at this work. Not just to blend in, not just to sit in the workshop audience and take notes, but to truly become the next Gillian Flynn or John Green or Robert Jordan (real name James Oliver […]
Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 13
Be careful about your sources of writing wisdom. Laugh at their jokes, marvel at their Amazon rankings, enjoy their work and the movies made from it. Just don’t buy into their writing world view without a thorough vetting… because you may already know more about how a novel should be built and fueled than they […]
Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 12
There is an A-list product, rather than an A-list process. I submit to you that the latter doesn’t exist. Because A-listers across the board, in equal measure, create their bestsellers using both sides of the proposition — organic pantsing and/or plotting leading to an outline — and everything in between, with no clear majority emerging. […]
Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 11
Below you will find six true statements about writing fiction today. True, that is, if your intention is to compete for readers, either via traditional publication or through self-publishing. This is what astute writers — many with buckets of blood lost in pursuit of these truths — have discovered as contradictions to what some consider […]
Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 10
Pantsers and Planners… we’re all just bozos on this bus. (If you get this quote then you may be a social trivia genius… this is a paraphrase from the title of a 1971 comedy album by the Firesign Theater.) Principle-driven, criteria-informed…right there is our opportunity to raise the bar for our work. Hopefully, the process […]
Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 9
Tips to Running a Business and Improving Your Education Every business owner has to wear a lot of different hats. For most entrepreneurs, education is a big reason for success. Yet, those same businesses often cut their own education programs. So how do you keep that momentum going and find time for education when you run a company? Check out a few […]
Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 8
Straight Talk About The Long Odds… … with the assurance there exists a way to beat, or at least mitigate, those odds. According to an article in the Huffington Post, 96 percent of manuscripts submitted to literary agencies for representation are rejected by those agencies. They won’t even try to take your novel to market. […]
Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 7
The Importance of Square One Here’s a scary fact of life for fiction writers: Not all story ideas are good story ideas. Not all of them, even when they glow in the dark at the first spark of inspiration, can be made to work on all the levels necessary within a novel or a screenplay, […]
Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 6
For the story to emerge… before it can work… certain principles and criteria apply. The fundamental truths about what causes a story to work aren’t optional or random, any more than sutures and staples are optional in a surgical procedure, or wings are less than compulsory in the design of an airplane. Successful genre-centric writers […]