By Nancy Ellen Hird In her book Writing Irresistible Kidlit (Writer’s Digest Books, 2012), industry insider and former agent Mary Kole writes that kids read differently than adults. She writes they read: • Voraciously • Communally (Friends pass books to each other.) • Socially (Kids talk about books to each other and it is important to be reading what your …
Transitions: Getting From Here To There
by Winnie Griggs Have you ever heard any of the following about your work? • It’s choppy, abrupt or jarring • It seems to jump around too much • It’s hard to follow • The individual scenes feels as if they were written in ‘chunks’ and then pasted together These are all signs that you may need to work on …
Life Happenings Can Lead to Ministry
by Bonnie S. Calhoun Many of you probably aren’t old enough to remember….yeah…I’m dating myself…but there used to be a TV show called “This is Your Life.” In that show the subject would sit and watch a big screen that rolled pictures of their many life events and people from those pictures would sit back stage narrating the scenes. Of …
Make God a Part of Your Dreams
God calls us many times to delight in him. Paraphrased, from Psalms 1: Blessed is the one whose delight is in the law of the Lord. And the one I want to talk about today, that I always hold close when I think of getting a book published, from Psalms 37:4 Delight yourself in the LORD; and he will give …
The My Fair Lady Journey of a Writer
by Lindsay Harrel I’m a total musical nerd. I. Love. Musicals. It’s not just the fact that they’re always full of a variety of characters that make me laugh, cry, and everything in between. Or that everything is set to music (though that’s a major plus!). It’s also about the journey characters make – yes, much like in novels. My …
Pinkerton Agents, Inventions, and the Charming Villain: Three Essential Ingredients of a Good Bad Guy
By Kathleen Y’Barbo Will Tucker is a handsome fellow with enough charm and drop-dead good looks to gain more than one wealthy fiancé. And he does. Not exactly hero material, is he? That’s because Will Tucker, the subject of my new Southern-with-a-dash-of-Steampunk historical series The Secret Lives of Will Tucker is not the hero. He’s the villain. Writing a series …
Plotting With God: Turning Story into a Journey of Faith
by Margaret Brownley The challenge for any Christian writer is to tell a good page-turning story that also enlightens and encourages readers. For the writer starting out, working a meaningful faith arc into a manuscript can be daunting (It was for me coming from the secular market). How much or little faith does a book require and what makes a …
Slowing Down the Pace
by Kathi Macias I hear a lot about the need to “slow down the pace” of our writing, and I know that especially applies to me. I am definitely not one of those who spends too much time on descriptions and backgrounds. Anyone who’s read my books knows I like to throw the reader right smack-dab into the action from …
Do You Have to Write What You Know?
by Crystal Laine Miller Beginner writers are often told to “write what you know,” which isn’t bad advice. When you’re learning to write, it will keep you concentrating on the craft and not worrying about the research quite as much. What if you’d like to know some new things to write about? Or what have you always wanted to learn? …
My Learning Curve
by Maggie Brendan As I embark on my seventh book in five years, The Arrangement, book one, in yet another new series, Virtues and Vices of the Old West, I look back on those brief years on what I’ve learned about the crazy world of being an author and thankfully, it’s way more than I can share in this brief …