background preloader

Writing

Facebook Twitter

Writing and Publishing Tips and Links. Setting & Worldbuilding Whether you realize it or not, setting is a crucial part of everything -- characters, plot, and the overall "feel" of the story.

Writing and Publishing Tips and Links

This is doubly true if you're making up your own setting. It isn't just about accuracy and consistency; besides letting the reader know where your story is happening, it also sets the mood. If you want your story to have a dark, gritty, down-to-earth feel, you don't want some sunny Caribbean beach. You want the bad side of town, a dirty, dangerous place where the buildings rise up and blot out the smog-filled sky. Choosing a setting can be a tricky thing, whether your story is set on Earth or in another place altogether.

Somewhere in America Even if you narrow it down to only America, but there's still plenty of choices. If not, and you're entirely serious about getting this story eventually polished up for publication, you may want to invest some money in a trip to the location you're going to be writing about. Creating a Language. How To Write A Novel Using The Snowflake Method. Writing a novel is easy.

How To Write A Novel Using The Snowflake Method

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. Writer’s Digest - What Agents Hate. When writers try to get an agent, they are asked to run a difficult course, and run it under a microscope.

Writer’s Digest - What Agents Hate

Although the level of scrutiny that writers receive is huge, it is definitely surmountable. Read the following items that agents dislike and alter your approaches accordingly. Agents hate the following items: 1. Inquiries that show writers have not done their homework. This complaint usually fell into two categories: 1) submissions that are not the type of books an agency accepts, and 2) submissions that are not specifically addressed. 2. Agents are experts at evaluating what books are worth, and since they receive a percentage of the proceeds, they try to squeeze out top dollar. These tips excerpted from Author 101: Bestselling Secrets from Top Agents, by Rick Frishman and Robyn Freedman Spizman. 3.

Agents and editors prefer tightly focused books. 4. The Egg. The Egg By: Andy Weir You were on your way home when you died.

The Egg

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. And that’s when you met me. “What… what happened?” “You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. “There was a… a truck and it was skidding…” “Yup,” I said. “I… I died?” “Yup. You looked around. “More or less,” I said. “Are you god?” “Yup,” I replied.

“My kids… my wife,” you said. “What about them?” “Will they be all right?” RhymeZone rhyming dictionary and thesaurus.

Literature

I Write Like. The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia.