By Patricia Bradley It’s January 16th, one day past the halfway mark in January. So, how are those resolutions you made at the beginning of the month working for you? Or have you already cast them aside, broken and mangled? Raise your hand if that’s you. That’s me waving my hand. Oh, I’ve not broken them all. I’m still doing …
To Follow or Not to Follow the Yellow Brick Road of Writing Rules
By Ane Mulligan I began my writing journey as a playwright. I learned how to write good dialogue by default. As the creative arts director for my church, I’d write weekly sermon illustration sketches. With the first few scripts I wrote, my actors would change the way they said the lines. When I realized what they did, I listened carefully …
My Road to Self-Publishing – Part 1
By Kathy J. Perry After my dad passed, I began evaluating what I was doing with my life. Suddenly, it seemed all too short. I just didn’t feel like what I was doing really made a difference. I felt like impacting youth was really what I wanted to do. I had been a teacher earlier in life and feel that …
Finding Acceptance in a Tough Writing Industry
By Emily Conrad When responses to my debut novel started to come in from my launch team, a friend asked if the positive feedback encouraged me. Though, yes, the praise was a momentary boost, and no, I don’t want to consider what might’ve happened in my heart if the initial response had been the opposite, I had to confess that …
Storytelling Lessons (For Every Writer!) from the Gospels
By Susan A.J. Lyttek As Christian fiction writers, we weave our faith into our stories whether we mention God or not. We can’t help it because it is intrinsically part of who we are. And that is a good thing. It means for the non-Christian that our stories are salty and make them thirst for something more than this limited …
Perfectionism: How Can Something So “Perfect” Be So Wrong?
by Kathy Harris I’m a perfectionist. And that’s not a good thing. Taken to the extreme, perfectionism can lead to serious psychological issues and is, in fact, on the rise, especially among young people. (See, Harvard Business Review, January 26, 2018.) But, even those of us who have a casual acquaintance with perfectionism will find that our work can suffer …
Ten Wrongs Don’t Make a Writer
How to Avoid the Top Ten Fatal Flaws in Fiction By Kathleen Y’Barbo It is not yet 2019, but it won’t be long until we’re several weeks—or months into the new year, the time when New Year’s resolutions begin to lose their shine and some of us begin to wonder if we should have resolved NOT to make any …
Christmases that Rock Your Characters’ World
By Susan A.J. Lyttek When I signed up to write this Christmas blog post, I had dozens of ideas on what I would write about. I knew, somehow, the star of my post would be my seasonal mystery Plundered Christmas. It still will be, just not in any of the directions I had originally considered. For instance, I had notes …
Character Description: Two Challenges
By Jean Kavich Bloom As a fiction editor, I find novelists can encounter a couple of challenges when it comes to character descriptions: (1) keeping track of them so they don’t accidently give their heroine, for instance, blue eyes in chapter 1 and brown eyes in chapter 12, and (2) conveying them to readers more creatively than what can seem …
How to End 2018 with Success
By Beth K. Vogt “I never dreamed about success, I worked for it.” — Estee Lauder (1908-2004), American businesswoman I came across the quote by businesswoman Estee Lauder while working on several different blog posts. Her words encompasses a truth I believe: Living the dream – any dream – means doing the work. If you’re reading this blog post, odds …