The History of Serialized Fiction Gets a New Chapter. Since its early days, Science Fiction and Fantasy has told astonishing stories, but you couldn't always find them in a bookstore, or even as a single novel. The genre has seen many changes over the years, beginning with the magazine before the rise of a bound novel, and now, the introduction of the eBook. The pioneering SF novels weren’t released at once, but in a serialized format. Now, that might be returning. In the early 1900s, magazines reigned supreme in the United States. Other authors, such as E.E. The first major stage existed without a dedicated market for novels, and as a result, authors found ways to get their stories published, helping to set up the demand for standalone science fiction novels. One notable story, A.E. van Vogt’s, The Black Destroyer saw publication the seminal July 1939 issue of Astounding Magazine.
In the mid 1930s, publishers had begun to experiment with cheaper, mass produced books. Allen M. The major change has come with the rise of the eBook market. Notes on Writing Fight Scenes. These are notes my friend Sanan took from PAX last year regarding fight scenes. I really liked them, so I'm plastering them on my blog for all to see. :) General Consider and focus on the feelings of the character in the situation—angry, afraid, excited? Don’t force the scene, make it fit into the story. Make the fight scene feel like a natural point of progression in the story.Use the fight scene to offer insight into the character(s). Make It Interesting How does the character react? Writing Style In a fight scene, use short, quick sentences. Goal Remember, characters don’t always win the fight. Writing A Setting Of Where You've Never Been. Writers are a tricky brood of people.
You see, writers often must weave a tale set in a place (or a time period) that they have never been. How do you do that? Sure you can make it up and hope that it comes close to the real thing, but more often than not, you will get someone shooting you an email telling you that you are way off the mark in your setting. They used to LIVE in the place you are writing about and it never had the types of trees or flowers you wrote about. What if I were to write a story set in Scotland, yet I've never been there? Yes! So how does one go about writing a setting in a place you have never been before? If you have the money, take a vacation there! Those are just a few ways to learn more about the place you are writing about. What other suggestions do you have for creating a real and tangible setting when you've never been there before?
This post is brought to you by Sherrinda Ketchersid. 8 Common Creative Writing Mistakes. Are you making any of these mistakes in your creative writing? We all make mistakes in our writing. The most common mistake is the typo–a missing word, an extra punctuation mark, a misspelling, or some other minor error that is an oversight rather than a reflection of the writer’s skills. A more serious kind of mistake is a deep flaw in the writing. It’s not a missing word; it’s a missing scene. I see most mistakes as an opportunity to either learn something new or to make an improvement to a piece of writing.
Common Creative Writing Mistakes Here are some of the most common mistakes opportunities I have seen in creative writing, including fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. 1. Every once in a while I come across a piece of writing that starts of slow, then picks up momentum. 2. I’m reading a book right now that is jam packed with a bunch of descriptions and details that I don’t really need. 3. Despite popular belief, verbiage is not a synonym for words or text. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Fuck Yeah Character Development! How to Plan your Publishing Business. Before you explore author-publishing possibilities in this series, lets first have a look at your business plans as an author and the most important question: Why are you writing?
Are you creating for yourself (as a hobby, just for the fun of writing) – or for an audience? . Can you answer these questions: how many books with the same topic / the same genre are on the market? What is the sales ranking of these works? How are these books priced? What is the social media ranking of the most successful writers in this genre?
If you’re producing work for an audience, it means: playing by at least some rules of the industrycaring what others think of your workestablishing an authors platform from which to communicateinteracting with your audience and being available to themdoing things not for your art, but out of service to your audienceputting on a performance, or adopting some kind of “brand”marketing your work and being visible . .Why should authors have a business plan? . @111publishing . Writing Trilogies & Keeping Track Of Characters. Last year I attended a workshop taught by Anne Perry and I worked up the courage to ask her something I'd been wondering for years: how she keeps track of all her characters across her many series.
Her answer: I remember them. This is a post for those of us without Anne Perry's prodigious memory. Laura Moore On How To Write A Successful Trilogy Author Laura Moore offers writers tips on writing a successful trilogy. Plan and plot like there's no tomorrow This advice may lead you to think Laura's a born plotter but not so.
It ... helps if you can already have the first book in your series finished and have started the second when you make your deal with your publisher. ... Make lists of characters Make a list of characters for each book in the series. . - name - age - physical traits - where he/she lives - quirks Laura writes: It’s fairly easy to keep the characters straight in a four hundred-page [novel]. Tags And Traits TAGS are words you hang upon your character when you describe them. 3 Minutes to Better Scrivener Chapter Headings | Gene Lempp ~ Writer. Hi everyone! Today I have a great guest post from Ed Ditto on how to put extra spark into the presentation of our latest e-book extravaganza.
Excellent to have you here Ed, take it away. Guest Post by Ed Ditto Since a correctly-constructed Kindle book opens to the first page of Chapter One, a reader’s first impression of your work often arises from your chapter heading. Does it look professional? What follows are three jazzed-up chapter headings for Scrivener users to reproduce or riff on. Note that what you’re about to read is Mac-oriented and assumes a basic working knowledge of Scrivener. 1) Simple and contemporary In this article I’ll be building headings for a novella with chapters named for the geographical locations in which they take place. Here’s the first design, the quickest and easiest one, as shown in the Kindle Previewer: Then I’ve hit the Formatting pane’s Section Layout button and entered the following placeholder tags under Title Prefix and Suffix: How do these tags work?
Down The Rabbit Hole of Research By Bethanne Patrick You probably know the feeling. You might be stuck on something in your manuscript, or you might be flying through a section, when you hit a place that needs…research. What do you do? If you’re like me and many other writers, you open up a new tab on your browser and start furiously typing in search terms. Or you head to your reference books and start flipping pages. Woe be unto you if you actually decide to leave your desk and head to the library…that’s when you know you’ve truly gone down the rabbit hole of research.
Who knows when you might return? However, just as often, research done at the wrong time or to the wrong degree leads too far away from the page, which is where we truly want to be. That’s sound advice — if it works for you. Other novelists (the published kind) follow routines as individual as their writing. Tripp’s solution is to “read and read and read” for a few months before she begins writing, and to take notes.
Plotting the Mystery Novel. The classic mystery is popular fiction which follows a specific formula. Clever writers may try to change the formula, but the most clever will cling to it for a very good reason. They work within the bounds of the formula because it works! The following outline serves the modern mystery novel, as defined by editors and publishers. A typical story will contain 60,000 to 65,000 words (205 manuscript pages) and will be divided into 12 chapters, each approximately 17 pages in length. The Classic 12-Chapter Mystery Formula Act I Introduction of the crime (mystery) and the sleuth Chapter 1 A.
B. C. D. E. Chapter 2 A. B. Chapter 3 A. B. Act II Direct the investigation toward a conclusion which later proves to be erroneous. Chapter 4 A. B. C. Chapter 5 A. B. Chapter 6 A. B. Act III Change of focus and scope of the investigation. Chapter 7 A. B. Chapter 8 A. B. Chapter 9 A. B. C. D. Act IV Solution Chapter 10 A. B. Chapter 11 A. B. Chapter 12 A. B. The Secrets of Story Structure, Pt. 2: The Hook. Readers are like fish. Smart fish. Fish who know authors are out to get them, reel them in, and capture them for the rest of their seagoing lives. But, like any self-respecting fish, readers aren’t caught easily. They aren’t about to surrender themselves to the lure of your story unless you’ve presented them with an irresistible hook. Our discussion of story structure very naturally begins at the beginning—and the beginning of any good story is its hook.
Unless you hook readers into your story from the very first chapter, they won’t swim in deep enough to experience the rest of your rousing adventure, no matter excellent it is. What is a hook? The hook comes in many forms, but stripped down to its lowest common denominator, the hook is nothing more or less than a question. By Michael Crichton) or “How does a city hunt?” By Philip Reeve). Where does the hook belong? Examples from film and literature Pride and Prejudice Ender’s Game Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World Takeaway value. How I Easily Doubled My Daily Word Count | India Drummond. Since Christmas Day, I’ve written about 67,000 words on my new novel, Elder Druid. Considering I took off on average one day a week, that’s roughly 3000 words per day. Honestly, it’s been easy! I’ve never had such a smooth writing period ever. I have to admit, it’s surprised even me.
Compare that to my first published book, where I struggled badly to write the NaNo-required 1667 words per day in order to achieve the 50K in 30 days that is the goal of that program. So, how did I go from struggling with the concept of writing more than one thousand words per day to breezing through 3000 words per day? 1. This is the big one. Another vague instruction I left for myself was “Character X fights with Character Y.” As strange as it sounds, writing time is not the time to be forced to be inventive. Now, I still make all kinds of things up as I go along. 2. I downloaded a program called Free Alarm Clock. I’d say the same thing about taking a day off. 3. 4. I know how this sounds. 5. 6. Short Story Structures: Several Ways Of Structuring Short Fiction. I have a problem. For the past two years or so, every time I set out to write a short story--something, say, under 5,000 words--I fail miserably.
It grows and grows and grows until I'm writing a 20,000 word novella! And there's nothing wrong with that. It used to be it was hard to sell novellas but the form is experiencing a resurgence. It appears that as long as buyers are informed about the length of a story, they don't mind variety. (Further reading: Ian McEwan Believes The Novella Is The Perfect Form Of Prose Fiction) But I digress. The upshot is that I researched various structures that could be used for short stories because I think my problem is that I'm trying to use the structure of a novel for a short story.
Here's what I found. The Hero's Journey: The Structure For A Novel So that we'll have something to contrast the various short story structures with, here's the classic monomyth structure in visual form. Short Story Structure 1: A Character, In A Situation, With A Problem ... The Most Successful Techniques for Rising Early. ‘The proper response to life is applause.’ ~William Carlos Williams By Leo Babauta Waking early is one of my favorite things in the world. The morning is quiet as the world hasn’t begun stirring, the perfect time for meditation, writing, exercise and some quiet reading.
Waking early can give you an hour or three of extra time for focus and creativity. I haven’t written about waking early for awhile, mostly because my waking time is in constant flux. I’ve learned a thing or two about how to change your wake-up time with joy, and today I’ll share the most successful techniques in my many experimentations. The Gradual Method The best method for changing the time you wake up is to do it gradually — 10-15 minutes earlier for 2-4 days, until you feel used to it, and then repeat. That might seem too slow to most people, and you’re free to disregard this advice. Sudden changes of an hour earlier or more in your waking time are difficult, and not likely to last. 3 Steps to Actually Get Up.
7 Ways To Improve Your Outlines. Experienced screenwriters, novelists, and non-fiction writers tend to invest significant time in the outlining phase because this is where a lot of kinks get worked out. Here are some outlining techniques you can mix and match to enhance what you’re already doing: 1. Organize Lots of Material With The “Table Trick” The “table-trick” comes from best-selling business author Kent Lineback. Suppose you have aggregated a few hundred single-spaced pages of research, ideas, brainstorming, and notes, all in one document. Convert the entire document to a table with two columns and one row (split by paragraph). 2. Sometimes, writing a story is like solving a 500-piece puzzle–but there are 900 pieces in the box. An outline can be a way to keep track of all of these “puzzle pieces” and see more clearly what does and doesn’t fit together. One way to sort puzzle pieces for a fiction project is to create an outline using Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet designations as the headers. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
How To Write Description. Have you ever read a wonderfully descriptive passage and wondered, "How'd the writer do that? " Today, Kim Aippersbach, in per post How to write description, tells us how. First, though, here's the description Kim uses: And then they were crossing out of the tube into another foyer, and escorted by Christos through a pair of sleek doors clad in fine wood marquetry to a hushed hallway graced with mirrors and fresh flowers. And then into a broad living room backed by wide glass walls taking in a sweeping panorama of the capital, with the sun going down and the dusk rising to turn the city lights to jewels on velvet for as far as the eye could see, under a cloud-banded sky. 1.
The first thing I noticed: there isn't a single instance of the verb "to be. " 2. When describing something less is more. The next thing I noticed is how much Bujold doesn't tell us. 3. Kim writes: Description reveals character, can even reveal emotion, by showing what the character sees. Here's how Kim sums it up: 1. Ruby Slippered Sisterhood » Using Scrivener for Plotting. Fiction Submissions Guidelines. How to Write TV Series Bibles | Bang2Write. CREATING A SERIES BIBLE. Writing a Character's Dark Side. 13 Geeky Ways To Beat Writer’s Block — Veronica Sicoe. Writing Vivid Scenes. Scene Questionnaire – The Scene. The Series Bible. Three Ways to Ground Readers in Your World. Writers On The Move: Lazy Ways to Keep The Reader Hooked - The Dan Brown Secret.
Meanwhile… Lawyers and Writers: How They Share Methods. Archetypal Character. CK Wylde. How the Enneagram Personality System Works. Writers On The Move: Scenes PLANNING YOUR NEXT STORY: PART 3. Good Writing: Using The Senses. Fun With Loglines | Just Effing Entertain Me. Create a Character Bible to Flesh Out Your Star Characters | San Diego Professional Writer's Group. Keep track of your characters: How to write a Story Bible | Kit Frazier. Creating a Story Bible: The Basics | On Writing, Life, and Everything. Writing Numbers in Fiction. 25 pieces of advice for aspiring writers | Andrew Jack Writing. Twitter Lists to the Rescue. Facebook. How To Overcome Your Internal Naysayer Using Affirmations | Positive Writer. How I learned to stop worrying, and love failureWIL WHEATON dot NET: 2.0. Give Stories Added Depth With a ‘Ghost Plot’
Ask the editor: Tips for blending in the backstory. Edits and Everything Else: Adding Complexity to Your Characters. On Violence And Writing Fight Scenes With Jarrah Loh. Top 25 Forensic Science Blogs of 2012. 8 Government Conspiracy Theories (And How They Could Be Right) Top 10 Strategies for Making Your New Year's Resolution Stick.