By Bethany Turner Is there anything more mysterious to a writer than the concept of voice? We all want ours to be unlike any other in the market. To be distinct and powerful. But how do we go about developing it? More often than not, the top recommendation I see is to spend time reading other writers’ writing, to examine …
A Safe Investment
By Christa MacDonald Recently, one beautiful Saturday, I hit the plant shops with my two youngest kids and bought annuals for the mailbox planter and a few herbs for the kitchen garden. Massachusetts has a short growing season and, although I begin the season planting from seed, I end up buying some to enjoy the color until fall. As I …
Crafting A Great First Line (Hooking The Reader)
By Rachel Hauck In a world where indie and traditional authors are scraping for every bit of shelf space and reader attention, we have to up our game. One of the best ways is to craft a dynamite first line. But it’s hard to craft a first line. Many of us settle for “good enough.” But here’s the power of …
A Story Needs People
by Ann H. Gabhart “I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn’t exist.” (Berkeley Breathed) As a writer I have become emotionally involved with many characters that only came into existence because I imagined them and set them down on a …
Celebrate Independence Day!
By Carrie Stuart Parks Happy 4th of July! My new book, Formula of Deception, will have released yesterday. In it are some historical facts that I researched and I’d like to reflect on as we celebrate our independence. A theme of my writing is to show how events of the past impact the present. Although I may start my research …
The Writing Life
by Ane Mulligan My latest WIP is either going to kill me or be my opus. My main character did not reveal as much as I prefer before I started writing the story. I knew her home was steeped in secrets; I knew those. Or so I thought. But she withheld a few to spring on me at unsuspected times. …
Resolving Tension
By Sarah Hamaker As writers, we work with tension all the time—without tension, our stories would sag and our heroes and heroines would have very boring relationships. But this blog is about the tension we experience between what we want to work on and what we have to work on. For many of us, writing is not our fulltime job. …
Springing into the Next Story
by Jan Drexler Spring is here, and it’s time to start my next book! With this new beginning, I’ve already spent hours of preparation. I’ve cultivated the bed of ideas, throwing out stones and stray roots. I’ve poured over research materials as if they were seed catalogs, each with their own versions of the standard offerings. I’ve studied maps, terrain, …
Tips for Fighting the Dreaded Writer’s Block
By Amy Clipston Through the years I’ve found that my book projects fall into two categories—they either write themselves or writing them feels like having my teeth drilled. In other words, the characters either tell me the story or I push them through the story as if they were dead weight. My book Room on the Porch Swing, which releases …
What About Book Reviews?
By Nora St. Laurent A book review is a thoughtful discussion of a book’s content, style, strengths, value, limitations and recommendation for it (or not) for possible readers of a genre and/or subject. Here is an example of a possible compact review, “this book is a wild ride of adventure, romance and suspense. It would work well for a book …