How I Self-Edit My Novels: 15 Steps From First Draft to Publication. E. B. White declared, “The best writing is rewriting.” In other words, the best writing is editing. We find all kinds of info on how to write. But editing can be a little more slippery. Basically, this is because good editing skills are no different from good writing skills. If you know how to write a good plot, you’ll know how to edit one. And yet we all know the analytic editing process is totally different from the creative writing process. Step #1: The Outline Okay, I admit, at first glance, that header probably makes no sense. Step #2: The Daily Edit Before I dive into my daily writing sessions, I always take the time to run through a little warm-up. If I know something I wrote the previous day created an inconsistency within the earlier story, I also take this opportunity to go back and correct it.
Step #3: The 50-Page Edit One of my favorite editing tricks is what I call the “50-Page Edit” (James Scott Bell calls it the “20,000-Word Step Back”). Step #4: The “Final” 3 Edits. Guest Blog: K.M. Weiland Shares 10 Ways to Motivate Yourself to Write | Helium Blog. 10 Ways to Motivate Yourself to Write By K.M. Weiland Writers write. No brainer there. 1. Who says bribes are a bad thing? 2. Generally speaking, threats aren’t going to be as psychologically helpful as rewards. 3. Make writing as easy on yourself as possible by creating a special writing spot. 4. Nothing beats a schedule for carving out writing time in your busy day. 5. If you enjoy writing to music, create a writing playlist that has special significance for your work-in-progress. 6. Sometimes the looming mountain of all those unwritten words can be daunting. 7.
If schedules aren’t your thing (and even if they are), give yourself permission to be spontaneous. 8. If you’re having difficulty maintaining consistency in your writing schedule, bring in a partner on the job. 9. Eliminate as many distractions as you can. 10. The infernal internal editor is a valuable asset—but only when editing. K.M. Learn more about K.M Facebook Twitter Blog: Helping Writers Become Authors Website: kmweiland.com.
Community: Resources: Should You Attend a Writers Conference? No matter where you are in the process of becoming an author, attending a writers conference can be a valuable experience - especially if you're planning to take the indie route. If you've completed your manuscript or book proposal, you can: Get sections critiqued from agents, editors, and other attendeesLearn from industry professionals (in a session) or your author peers about the best ways to market itPitch it to a literary agent or an acquisitions editor from a publishing house If you are working on a manuscript or book proposal, you can: Get advice on editing, book design, and publishingRun the idea by publishing professionals to get thoughts on the book's sales potentialGet sections critiqued from agents, editors, and other attendeesLearn what goes into a compelling book description (aka "hook") If you haven't written a single word, you can: To find a writers' conference near you, just do a simple internet search.
-Maria You may also be interested in... Inspiration Can Be Everywhere. Bloom | "Late" According to Whom? Why Won’t Google Index My Website? This is a guest post by Charles Dodgson. If you would like to submit a guest article, please check out our guest post guidelines. When you own a website, the goal is to get search engines like Google to index your website and all of the blog posts and pages beneath it. It’s also important that they not only index it, but also start to rank you for targeted keyword phrases that correspond to topics that you cover on your website. If you are having trouble getting Google to index your website, you can follow these four suggestions to work out the problem. 1.
Make sure you have a sitemap installed A sitemap basically tells search engines like Google what pages on your website are there, and how often they should come back to check for updates. 2. Robots.txt files tells search engine spiders whether or not you want your website to be crawled. 3. If your website is fairly new, it’s highly possible that you haven’t built any backlinks to it yet. 4. Ask The Agent with Bree Ogden - Now Taking Your Questions! One of the most exciting and helpful features we offer in the LitReactor Magazine is our series of columns geared at answering reader questions. As you know, Erin Reel-- publishing and editorial consultant, writing coach, columnist and blog host-- led this feature with her masterly 'Ask The Lit Coach' series of columns.
But recently, Erin decided to hand the reigns over to a new expert and Bree Ogden was her obvious recommendation! Now, those of you familiar with our writing classes know Bree well. She taught our first ever comic class 'Intro To Graphic Novel Writing,' which sold out in its first run and recently had an encore. Bree represents graphic novels, children’s books, young adult, and art books at the D4EO Literary Agency. She has been a literary agent going on three years and has spent the last seven years in various departments of publishing. Here's a word from Bree on the type of questions she's looking for: I'm happy to answer any questions about the publishing industry. Homework Help, Book Summaries, Study Guides, Essays, Lesson Plans, & Educational Resources.
How to Write a Biography Biographies are delightful fun essays that most students enjoy writing. According to Webster's Dictionary, a biography is—1: a written history of a person's life; 2: biographical writings as a whole; 3: an account of the life of something (as an animal, a coin, or a building). In your class work, Biographies will be simple (and usually quite short) essays about someone else's life. An autobiography on the other hand, is a story (or essay) about your own personal life. As this section is about Biographies, you must keep yourself out of the essay altogether. In order to write a Biography, follow the following simple steps: Short story essays are an analysis of short stories you have studied | GetEssays’ Blog | Competent Essay Writing Help with Papers of any Kind.
Essay writing is a skill that all students must take the trouble to develop. You are expected to write essay assignments in every subject that you take up in college. As you move higher up in your academic life, you will need to write admission essays and later personal essays that will be attached to your resumes. Therefore it is essential that you learn how to write essays and develop your writing skills. Short story essays are usually assigned to literature students, as part of their writing assignments. Literature students are expected to apply their critical writing skills along with their analytical thinking skills to analyze the short stories prescribed in their course. Preparing to write good essays on short stories Literature students are required to develop their analytical thinking skills, as they need this skill to review their literature work and write critical and analytical essays. 1/- Analyze and identify You need to first analyze the story that has been given to you.
Journaling Apps for the iPad: iPad/iPhone Apps AppGuide. Overview Day One is the rare app that lives up to its hype. The award-winning app’s simplicity and elegance has made it the standard to which all other journal apps are compared. Day One’s best feature may be that it’s so easy and pleasant to use that you actually want to use it. The app has negligible load time, a clean interface, and nearly every feature you would want, such as: the ability to create multiple entries on the same day, style and font choices, optional passcodes and reminders, auto-addition of location and weather data, photos, tags, searching, and exporting all or some entries to PDF. In fact, the developers of Day One add features so often that it’s quite possible that the few features currently lacking (e.g., multiple journals and connections to social networks) will be added by the time you read this. Day One also sets itself apart with its effortless syncing via iCloud that works nearly error-free between iOS devices and the companion Mac app.
Essential Apps. How To Write A Novel Using The Snowflake Method. Writing a novel is easy. Writing a good novel is hard. That’s just life. If it were easy, we’d all be writing best-selling, prize-winning fiction. Frankly, there are a thousand different people out there who can tell you how to write a novel. There are a thousand different methods. In this article, I’d like to share with you what works for me. This page is the most popular one on my web site, and gets over a thousand page views per day, so you can guess that a lot of people find it useful.
Good fiction doesn’t just happen, it is designed. For a number of years, I was a software architect designing large software projects. I claim that that’s how you design a novel — you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story. If you’re like most people, you spend a long time thinking about your novel before you ever start writing. But before you start writing, you need to get organized. Step 1) Take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your novel. Shorter is better. Character Questionnaires - Get to Know Your Characters. Receive more writing tips and advice (along with special offers and other Gotham news).
One of the best ways to get to know your characters is to ask questions about them. Many writers do this as a kind of homework before they actually start writing a story. The more you know your characters, the fuller they will be. This might also make your story easier to write. Character Questionnaire 1 This questionnaire is found in Gotham Writers Workshops Writing Fiction. You might start with questions that address the basics about a character: What is your characters name? What is your characters hair color? What kind of distinguishing facial features does your character have? Does your character have a birthmark? Who are your characters friends and family? Where was your character born? Where does your character go when hes angry?
What is her biggest fear? Does she have a secret? What makes your character laugh out loud? When has your character been in love? Look at your characters feet. About | Bloom. MISSION Welcome to Bloom — a literary site devoted to highlighting, profiling, reviewing, and interviewing authors whose first major work was published when they were age 40 or older. Bloom is also a community of artists and readers who believe that “late” is a relative term, not an absolute one, and who are interested in bringing to attention a wide variety of artistic paths — challenging any narrow, prevailing ideas about the pacing and timing of creative fruition.
If someone is labeled a “late bloomer,” the question Bloom poses is, “Late” according to whom? The age of 40 is in some ways an arbitrary marker; we use it flexibly, as more of a guidepost than a cut-off, recognizing that the stories we’re interested in, the life journeys, are complicated. Consider Toni Morrison, and George Eliot, both of whom published their first book-length works of fiction at age 39. Slow, later, and older produces as great if not greater literary work than fast, early, and young. Like this: Writing: What are some great online writing tools that are free. Plot Structure: A Literary Elements Mini-Lesson. ReadWriteThink couldn't publish all of this great content without literacy experts to write and review for us. If you've got lessons plans, activities, or other ideas you'd like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you.
More Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals. More Teacher Resources by Grade Your students can save their work with Student Interactives. More Home › Classroom Resources › Lesson Plans Lesson Plan Overview Featured Resources From Theory to Practice Freytag’s Pyramid is a tool for mapping plot structure, which allows readers to visualize the key features of stories. Back to top Plot PowerPoint Presentation: Use this presentation as an introduction to Freytag's Pyramid and the literary element of plot. Plot Diagram: Students can use this online tool to map the plot of any story, play, movie, or other text.
Further Reading. 30+ Tools For The Amateur Writer. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is almost upon us. On November 1st, brave souls everywhere will embark on a month long endeavor to write a story of at least 50,000 words. We've gathered 30+ tools to help those folks who want to try their hand at it. Collaborative Writing Coventi.com - A site offering several different packages, with the cheapest being free for the personal user. Google Docs - Part of the Google suite of products, which enables you to invite others to work with you on a document. Glypho.com - Put down the basic idea of your story, get a plot and character suggestions. Novlet.com - Collaborative writing where you write just a couple of paragraphs at a time. Portrayl.com - A site that lets you write one chapter at a time, and when done, release it as a PDF. SynchroEdit.com - A browser-based editor that allows multiple users to edit the same document at the same.
WideWORD.net - Create a secure document online and then pick who can look at it and participate. See also: yWriter5 - Free novel writing software to help you write a book. Unsolicited feedback from yWriter users "Wow!! This program is AMAZING! I started the day overwhelmed, with a million notes in different places on my laptop and iPad, a million ideas in my head and no idea about how to corral it all into a cogent manuscript.
After trying a few other writing programs that just didn't click with me, I installed yWriter5 and started organizing my myriad ideas into concrete chapters and scenes. "After a long struggle with Word, I downloaded yWriter & yBook, and I just want to say "thanks" for a set of tools that think the way writers do. "After 20 years in the IT business I've gained a deep appreciation for programs that set out to do a specific job, then do it better than anything else. yWriter5 fits in that category. " "Bottom Line: If you're writing a novel, YWriter is what you need. " "For a long time I have looked for a tool to assist me in my sermon preparation to no avail.
yWriter has been reviewed in PC Magazine. (4.5/5 stars) "Thank you for yWriter. Reading Like a Writer (P.S.): Francine Prose: Amazon.com. Write Away: One Writer's Approach to the Novel: Elizabeth George: Amazon.com. Plan Your Article Writing with an Editorial Calendar. Want an Effective System to Help You Get Ahead? Try one of the most popular systems used in the writing and publishing field: an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar can help you stay on track, increase your exposure with precise planning, and ultimately save time. Also, your editorial calendar doesn’t have to be limited to your article writing efforts. You can (and should) include your social networking strategy, newsletter, new publication launches, multi-media efforts (e.g. webinars, videos, podcasts, etc.), and more! The article writing portion of your editorial calendar should include these five steps to effective article writing and publishing: Brainstorming (including idea generation, research, and planning)WritingProofreading and EditingSubmittingPublishing These steps can be performed both in the short-term or long-term, but the important key is: plan it by scheduling it in your editorial calendar ahead of time – daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and/or yearly.
What I Learned Writing Dreamlander: Your Must-Have Book Checklist: From Idea to Publication. Mind Map.