Your Focus
How wide will you spread your net?
Going to concentrate just on that first novel? Are you going write short stories for publication? Sell articles online for money?
My Focus
- Writing fiction
- Other potential services (see below)
Writing Craft
Blog posts about the craft of writing: thoughts, resources, things to keep in mind, and more
Brandon Sanderson
In my journey delving deeper into the craft of writing, I become more and more impressed with Brandon Sanderson: not just with his skill as a writer, but with his breadth of activity with writing as business.
Continue readingCraft Links: Scenes
- Sometimes you just need to get the scene out, in rough form.
- But, if you’re more a planner, you can try beat sheets.
- Found a solid, basic article on the two basic levels of scene structure
- Need a stronger opening for your scene? Jane Friedman’s article on 4 Key Ways to Launch a Scene is a good one.
- When you’re ready to add depth, Jodie Renner has excellent advice.
Business Plan Overview
Will this post help you with the business side of writing?
Despite my oh-so-limited time to spend on anything writing related, I am treating my writing as a business. I’ve had a business plan from the beginning. Not a professional, capture-venture-capital kind of business plan, but a comprehensive guide to my own efforts to be successful. It’s an ever-evolving document as I flesh out details.
This is the first in a series of posts about my business plan. Hope it helps!
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Scene Planning
As I learn more and more about the craft of writing, I find myself laying out more and more elements for a scene: structure, story elements, plot elements, emotion beats, even Kowal’s yes-but and no-and strategy she mentions on Writing Excuses (Jill Williamson describes it here).
To wrap my brain around it, I turned to Scrivener and fell in love, yet over time it felt clunky and awkward. I waited for Scrivener 3 for Windows with greedy anticipation. And waited and waited…
Continue readingFalling In Love with Scrivener and… The Letdown
I fell in love with Scrivener for Windows earlier this year. It’s a great app in that it collates everything to do with your novel into one place. It’s highly customizable. It allows you to move scenes around with ease. It tracks meta-data for each scene in a number of different views.
What’s more, the Scrivener development team promised a major release and update for Windows users, to bring them up to the same level of functionality Mac users have enjoyed for some time.
What wasn’t to love?
Continue readingWriting Advice: 5 Best Writing Resources of 2019
Currently, my five top writing resources:
- Writing Excuses. This podcast rocks. Professional authors, relevant information, no fluff, just the meat of what good writing is.
- The Business of Being a Writer. Jane Friedman’s Facebook group is invaluable to prepare me for professional publication, electronically or otherwise.
- Scrivener. There’s no doubt this writing tool has organized my writing and increased my productivity.
- Absolute Write. This website forum is massive with very active members. It’s helped answer wide-ranging questions, given me a way to hone my critiquing skills, provided a mechanism for others’ input to my work, and much more.
- Google. Yes, okay, it’s ubiquitous. But, it’s still so very useful. How do I use it?
- Google Search: writer’s workshops, the difference between alpha and beta readers, whether or not making water from hydrogen and oxygen in space is better than collecting ice and melting it… and so much more.
- Google Drive, principally to share writing excerpts for critique, or to critique others’ work
- Google mail. I have an account just for my writing, including newsletters that I subscribe to.
Writing a Novel and Writing Code Share…
…an astounding ambiguity with terminology. You’d think, as long as writing has been around, those in the publishing industry would have agreed to standard definitions, a standard vocabulary. Not so.
And, surprisingly, neither has the software industry. Software being considered more of a science, one would expect practitioners to have agreed on common terms. Yet, even what title you call one who codes, develops, and engineers software varies: software engineer, programmer, software developer, systems engineer, systems analyst, and many more.
So, with those who read a book in draft form one can have critiquers, alpha-readers, beta-readers, writing partners, mentors, development editors, line-by-line editors, and more.
One might argue that each of these titles connotes a different flavor of responsibility, but the lines are definitely blurred.
7 Quick Ways to Finding Your Writing Tribe
Is your goal to find other writers you can meet face-to-face, who want to be published, who strive for professionalism as an author, and who want to share the journey and exchange feedback on a periodic basis?
If you answered yes, what are your options?