By Dianna Booher My most valuable learning experience in graduate school also happened to be my most humiliating. Having read the first hundred pages of my master’s thesis, one of my thesis directors, a literary prize-winning novelist himself, handed back my novel with downcast eyes and mumbled something about “needs to be tightened.” One line of his review of my …
Five Ways to Tell You’re Not Mrs. Muir
By Cathleen Armstrong Have you seen The Ghost and Mrs. Muir? That 1948 movie about a widow who lives by the sea and writes a book with the help of a ghostly sea captain? From the time I first saw the old film, it was my fantasy to be Mrs. Muir. But the more I wrote, the more it became …
Pruning
by Cynthia Ruchti If fascinates me that the Bible not only inspires and encourages writers, informs the character growth of the writer, but teaches writing techniques, too. The edits for my May 2015 novel-As Waters Gone By-brought that thought into clear focus. As I worked through the notes my editor made, I noticed throw away words or overgrowth that needed …
Rewrites…
By Katherine Reay We like to call them edits. Or perhaps macro-edits, if we want to sound crafty. But sometimes, they are simply re-writes – a ponderous process to push the story where it should have already been. I’ve just been through a bout of these and it was a humbling experience. I tried to push myself and attempt/accomplish new …
Tips to Supercharge Your Story
By DiAnn Mills When our stories lack a certain edge, we’re back to the drawing board looking for what we’ve missed. Our novels are like well-oiled machines, each part has to be fine-tuned to work effectively. When are skills, methods, and storytelling abilities creak and moan, the whole novel comes to a grinding halt. Sometimes we’re able to reach into …
Love Does Stay True
By Martha Rogers Today is our 55th wedding anniversary, and what better way to celebrate than to tell how my novel, Love Stays True, came to be. It’s a story loosely based on my great-grandparents love story after the Civil War. The idea sprang from three letters my dad gave me in 1995. His father had given them to him …
Dissecting The Old To Make It New
by Gail Gaymer Martin By the time novelists sell to a traditional publisher, they’ve donated a large amount of time honing their craft. Rejection points out a weak writing technique: pacing, dialogue, point of view or other flaws. Learning to write a good book is a craft. Many people say someday they’re going to write a book. They sit down, …
Write Tight
by Maureen Lang I’ve just finished my current Work In Progress, and I always share my first draft with at least one trusted friend and critique partner before starting my revision process. Fresh eyes have a way of spotting plot twists that fall flat, character traits that don’t ring true or, the subject of today’s blog post, unnecessary verbiage. The …
Fast Edits
by Bonnie S. Calhoun Fast Edits This is a fast and down-dirty review of the things you should look for as you go through your self-edit of your manuscript. If you can catch all these, you’ve got a good start to a great manuscript. Weasel Words These are words that weaken the writing, thus the story. We sometimes type them …
What, No Adverbs?
by Donna L. Rich So many “how to” books tell me to weed out weak adverbs, and as I look at my own work, I’m paranoid. However, I’m not paranoid enough. In writing this post, I referred to my current edit in process. I wanted to see how many times I used an ly word when a stronger verb would …