By Preston Shires I don’t think of myself as a particularly funny guy, and I believe if you asked any one of my students, my opinion would be confirmed, especially after finals. However, I do like to write a story that is entertaining, and therefore I do make several attempts at humor in my writings. With a few readers, I …
Building Back the Walls
By Elizabeth Musser Lord, reading Nehemiah 3 this morning has brought me to tears. It’s basically just a list of names of people that I don’t recognize. There are not many who are superstars in the Word of God. Just a lot of ordinary people. Oh, but what they are doing is extraordinary. They’re rebuilding the walls around Jerusalem. The …
Fool Proof Pitches
By Deborah Clack For those of you who are trekking across the country to San Antonio, Texas for the annual ACFW conference, let me dispel your fears. No cowboy boots required. But you might be thinking that ACFW is big! And the state of Texas even bigger, almost as massive as the nerves that come along with pitching a manuscript. …
A Cast of Characters
By Shirley E. Gould As we strive to craft amazing manuscripts, our plots and genres are nothing without great characters. An interesting hero or heroine coupled with a riveting plot keeps us at our laptops creating word count. For our characters to be imprinted on our reader’s memory, we continue to search for unique people to put on the page. …
Vacations Can Stimulate Novel Writing
By Gail Gaymer Martin Anything we experience that’s new to us is something we can keep an eye on and tuck into our mind and memories. As a novelist, I tend to view my surroundings with creativity and story possibilities. It’s amazing what can come from visiting new places using all of one’s senses to capture the aura and experience …
Get Closer to Your Story With the Power of “Why?”
by Carol Alwood Space exists between us and our stories. As much as we can imagine these fictional dreams, we can’t transcribe unfolding events. There’s a rift between what we imagine and what we write. This gap, depending on how wide it becomes, can be the victory or downfall of our books. It may be why readers continue or stop …
5 Ways an Author Website Can Help Grow Your Platform
By Elizabeth Ludwig I belong to several organizations for writers. In recent months, one topic of conversation crops up more than any other…author websites, and the questions being asked are almost always the same. Do I need an author website? What sort of content should I include? How often should I update? Obviously, answering even one of these questions could …
The Puzzle Method
By Kristi Holl Starting a new novel can be overwhelming. Our minds jump around as we fill dozens of colored sticky notes with snippets of ideas. Eventually we end up with hundreds of bits of information. Where do we start to make sense of it all? One summer I found a solution when putting together a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with …
Mastering the Art of Story Description
By DiAnn Mills Mastering the art of story description is an exciting creative process for the writer. We use our imaginations to step into a character’s shoes and live the adventure from page one to the end. Various techniques show fresh and unusual details through the point of view character, and the result immerses the writer and the reader into …
Re-membering Memory
By Christine Sunderland Writers are the bearers of memory, the shepherds of our culture’s past. In my novels, I have worked to call that past into our present, so that we may protect it in the fold of words, words that carefully curate the stories of Western Civilization. In The Fire Trail (eLectio, 2016) I tried to pull together the …