The Write Stuff

Consider your should’s, whenever you tell yourself what to expect about making a book for the world. Meeting your expectations comes with a lot less angst when your sights are set reasonably.

Creating and publishing a book is taking on a challenge. David Brooks says that’s good for our souls.

Creators need support, in part because art often fights its way to the forefront of our souls. You can be that supporter.

Many books are bestselling, but getting onto a list takes note of the biggest of the bestsellers at the time.

People are what we enjoy observing, and their conflicts and troubles entertain and captivate us.

Like buying better scuba gear or the $170 shoes for the pickleball court, you play a better game when investing in your retirement writing career. You need to write better to be heard.

You might have an interest in getting an audiobook out as your first step into publication. Print could come second.

I’m not a natural outliner. Oh, the pantsing I’ve enjoyed. Writing by the seat of your pants has a cost, though. You over-write and take much longer to finish. Sketch characters first, at least.

Mundane memories don’t earn their keep just because you can remember them well. The everyday event, the droll habit, the mundane action, they all need something more.

We doubt a little bit how much difference a blurb can make. We do this blurbing for one another as authors, hoping that our audiences can help the new author getting introduced.

Hope is an essential element to creating a book. For months, or years, or even longer, your book is going to little more than a dream in your head and heart.

Some of your friends and allies don’t know how to help your fiction succeed. They want to help you make the story realistic, a thing that doesn’t have a primary place in fiction.

You only get to a debut after you finish a book. You will do better at that finishing with help from buddies.

Any outside confirmation can be better than none. A review can show you the doubts about your book didn’t appear outside my critical artist’s head.

With weeks of time in the cabin, or on deck coming up, John asked what books would I recommend to a fiction writer, one who’s setting sail for a cruise around the Pacific.

Writers who work to become authors will feed their books. With time, with money, with devotion. Once you’re in the stretch of book release, it must go beyond the matter of saying, “If it doesn’t cost too much, I’d like some reviews.”

In our modern era, our AI systems—advanced software and blistering-fast computers are having their way with authors’ works. Just in the last few years, though, contracts are changing.

It’s not that men don’t read fiction at all. They’re more comforted by discovering facts than reading stories of emotion and imagination.

There are two kinds of diversity to embrace. Personality and mission are the primary choices.

When it’s time to get reviewers on board the rocket sled of release. BookFunnel is a more affordable solution for distributing review copies.

I always imagined I was the driving character in that play, and I wasn’t wrong. Villains make trouble and cause pain.

Shiny objects help. if you think of people reading your book, it can help propel you through the dry spells, or the places where you have all these pieces and you’re assembling them.

Your legacy writing should aim for more, though. You want to bring the idea of largesse to your legacy.

Gabriella Pereira has a DIY MFA book that’s very hands-on and prescriptive. She calls the cohort a community. You do three things to MFA-up your passions.

A lot of advice from marketing and publishing experts says that newsletters entice book readers. These things also connect you to book buyers.

You might like dialogue. A lot. Don’t believe in narration, since you think showing is always better than telling. But even a scene can be in narrative, instead of just dialogue.

We’re all sharing tips and our habits about dialogue.

Writing chapter summaries keeps you inside the realm of your book, simple work around its edges where you sum up what’s unfolded in each piece of the story.

Someone’s got to decide if the ghostwriting is as complete as it could be. That someone will be you, as the author being ghosted. Expect the ghostwriter’s contract with you to enforce healthy boundaries.

You want to be especially careful about paying for somebody’s coaching who says you’ll get an agent. You can imagine how many problems look like a nail while such a coach swings that kind of hammer.

See if you can create something unexpected but understandable. Know the rules, but break them when you can.

Nonfiction sure demands more of an author. When you write among the world of realism and facts, there are so many other voices that accompany yours. Nonfiction demands that we authors study our proposals and see all the points we need to hit.

Narrators in fiction and memoir tell a richer tale when they give us both the sizzle of the moments back-then, along with the comprehension and wisdom of narrating from the present.

You write, then someone you trust reads it to help improve it. That’s the other gear, once you’re ready: coaching.

Owning craft books is a mark of experience. The mark that is indelible, though, requires cracking spines.

Knowing what’s crucial to a story means learning to see it from afar. Keeping the synopsis lively and brimming with your voice is the special sauce that makes them savory.

The way that you get published doesn’t determine if your book is genuine or not.

The San Antonio Book Festival opens its selection process about this time every year. They also talk about how they choose the books that will earn attention from attendees each year.

Hemingway said that for him, it was write or die — but he really meant it was write and die, and then live again in your writing.

The one thing you can count on from MFA degrees is community, he says. He also warns us about borrowing tuition money for any arts degree. That tuition makes an automatic community for those who weathered the workshop critiques and writing over a two or three-year course of study.

Author-publishing money is not just in selling your ebooks on Amazon or Kobo. There’s money to made getting your popular books’ sub-rights sold by an open-minded agent.

If you come away from the freedom of job time with a new practice of writing an hour a day, that can sustain you, both during unemployment as well as afterward.

Scrivener opens your eyes to what’s inside your book.

Whether you write fiction or make non-fiction, there’s probably more than one book in your concept or your premise.

Rules for writing from John Steinbeck are more open-ended. He was a Nobel Laureate. 50 years ago, his rules appeared in the Paris Review.

You have to like the action, as the sports fans say, to stay in publishing today. It’s a little like show business, in that the miracle is making a little profit while you practice what amounts to the commercial art of storytelling.

Pace is something to balance. Sometimes we want things to be simply given to us, like Kurt Vonnegut advises. At other times readers want to simmer in the possibilities.

Booksellers demand store event plans from authors. You partner with a store to make an effective event.

While you’re looking over your writing, you can also pay attention to how often the word look gets in the way of what readers see.

Editing assignments serve many needs of a book. Development means creating a full draft. Editing means making that draft better.

In her book Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway says that removing filters from your writing is the express lane to more vivid writing.

Distribution. That word is not used in many discussions about what makes books great or how they become bestsellers. Not-great books do become bestsellers, and that result can come from the success of distribution.

Even when you’re writing nonfiction, you can be stretching your fiction legs.

Query summary writing can be the most challenging you will face. You don’t have to know the exact ending, or cover all the meaty plot points, to write this summary.

Donald Murray wrote an essay for the magazine The Writer that sums up 10 habits that lead to writing success.

The interior life of characters flows out of narrative writing that is used in fiction. Finding ways to make narrative stand in for your scenes is good work when you’re revising, or even drafting a book.

Here’s a list of fundamental questions to ask a publisher, or your publicist, about this discovery process.

Working with the care that a copywriter for J. Peterman would use, small details bring a story into sharp focus.

Difficult material lies at the start of a memoir, and there’s usually stories in it you’d rather not tell again. But as a kid, you could write those stories with the pencil on paper gusto. The meaning hadn’t crept up on you yet.

As authors we rely on outside eyes. In a workshop group, you rely on the eyes of your fellow writers: people at varied levels of skill and experience.

A coaching client developing a novel asked a delicious question. What books would I recommend to a fellow fiction writer who’s setting sail for a cruise around the Pacific?

Smiling makes us less curious. When we are told that a character smiled, and then read a line of dialogue, or we watch that character smiling during a scene, we get shortchanged.

It’s going to be mighty hard, maybe impossible, to create a book that people will recommend without first revising it. I believe many of us will never live to see attractive and enticing AI revision of fiction.

Tone is also mysterious, but it can be identified. Tone equals attitude, or tone makes ‘tude.

Printers have good days and bad days. You’ll never experience unglued pages while reading an e-book, and it will handle great with no smudges. That’s total control of the manufacturing process, defined.

Novels don’t run on 98 percent dialogue. Talking and nothing else just doesn’t move a reader fast enough through the time frame of the story.

Third person is a point of view that lays out the world of your story like a carpet. It covers every character, if it’s omniscient.

An interactive map feature on the Texas Monthly website tours you through the leading indie bookstores across Texas.

Our stories thrive on stakes. What the hero might lose. How new knowledge can save them. We give characters skills and powers that will affect the story, and when the stakes are high enough, those can be amazing powers.

World-building is not just for genre. It paints the interior of your story by using understanding so your dialogue makes sense.

We might all start by accepting that publishing a book, in any way, is an act of ego. It had better be.

Well, everyone can write, says the AWA, so let’s get together and write for short sprints, then read it aloud and hear what people loved. It’s a powerful elixir, knowing that three or four people will find something positive to say about just-forged writing. For until we know what’s working in our writing, we have no business hunting down what’s not working.

The narrator in novels or memoirs tells a richer tale when they give us both the sizzle of the moments back-then, along with the comprehension and wisdom of narrating from the present

A book won’t need to go on strike to protect its rights to entertain, enlighten, and educate. Authors build in that protection through contracts.

A short novel can feel very in vogue. The 60,000-word novel is making a comeback, not fighting to be taken seriously.

Micro-genres can help readers understand that even something like a cozy can have non-traditional-cozy elements.

Building characters demands that we know their desires and their fears.

When you ask for a line-drive edit, you ask your editor to drive to the finish. Problems with character motives or consistency melt away with the work an editor does in a line-drive.

By defining what is easier for a machine to write, we settle upon what stories are best for humans to create. We fulfill our destiny and potential as authors when we make stories that have a sense of meaning.

In our spring bluebonnet edition, we look at outside agent gigs. Agents need more than wonderful authors. Some need editing gigs while they wait for the oil gusher of a book to appear.

Let’s go out with style. Let’s create things that lead to understanding, insight, and entertainment using our carbon-based intelligence.

Writing what you don’t know can be better advice for fiction authors. While you’re learning about your subject, your research makes the writing come alive.

Why, you must ask yourself, is that Big Book so essential to your story? Be honest about whether what’s creating the bloat is really world-class scenarios that would spice up any narrative.

Going beyond the first answer is essential whenever you let AI do your groundbreaking. Remember that these resources are not search engines. They’re something called an understanding engine.

Here are Elmore’s rules. Try to use them for your next book, or the novel you’re working on right now.

The root of the word disciple means to show a devotion, so these practices are the devotional work we do as writers while creating stories.

There are 15 beats that a story uses in the Save the Cat method. There’s also a fine book that applies this method to writing a novel. In her Save the Cat Writes a Novel craft book, Jessica Brody shows us how.

How in the world could a tumbledown spot make a difference in creating a book? The rules of inspiration are mysterious. An image or a concept or an association can occur in a workspace removed from your routine.

You either like these so much it’s hard to imagine expression without them, or believe are a sad step backward in our culture. If you’re among the former and are working on later-generation audience newsletters, take heart. There are two resources to translate for you

Once you’re inside the work, making just one passage, you’re likely to do more. We teach each other about this kind of persistence in the Workshop’s Finishing School — which a lot of the time is Working School. No work = no finishing.

Strunk & White, the style experts. They say, keep it short; erect a pup tent, not a cathedral. You make the writing into something holier on your rewrite. Lower your standards for your first draft. Let your hands do the thinking. You can raise your standards during revision.

They’re handy, especially if the prologue is a separate, free-floating, storytelling bubble to show readers some critical information or character background that you can’t work into the main story.

In a novel or story, your dialogue needs to sound natural and dramatic. Sentence fragments, the kind that Word warns you about, make for the natural flow and include one-word lines.

In the racecourse of writing, the semicolon is the middle ground. It’s a harder stop than a comma, lacking the drama of the long dash, and tossing away the authority of the colon.

Style is the biggest container of these three. It’s the way an author uses language to express ideas, convey emotions, and create a certain mood or atmosphere.

Any book, fiction or non-fiction, benefits from a view from on high. That’s your author’s chair. The scenario is your radar screen where you track the activity flowing through your book.

Every single review source that’s credible has a commercial side.

Remind yourself that your book will change for the better, so long as you keep taking your swings at it. Give it a chance to score a winning run, no matter how that looks to you. Putting your ball into play, on a field where we can see it, is the way to make a dream come alive.

Would you rather be promoting your book, instead of formatting it? Doing promotion is always the author’s job, whether you have a book contract or you publish yourself. Here are your choices.

What makes a publisher traditional varies a lot. It comes down to editing, design, promotion, and business. A publisher that doesn’t edit a book has a strikingly different idea of what traditional means.

Marketing and PR is a dark art. Authors can behave badly when they expect such work as part of a contract. But behaving badly isn’t very accurate. Authors behave blindly. Many expect publishing pros to just do their jobs, somewhere out of the author’s sight, thank you. Take an interest in marketing with these tips

Today is National Donut Day. But is it really spelled and styled that way? The question offers a look at three facets of copyediting: style, house-style, and usage.

Writing stories in first person is an electric thrill for many authors. You have easy access to emotions and sensations, plus the mystery of solving the problems of the plot is intense, too. Sometimes it’s tempting to want to use multiple first person points of view. Consider why you need more than one.

Dreaming up 10 Key Scenes gives the pantsers and the plotters a middle ground to make that to-do list.

You don’t need to reach in order to make Scrivener turbo-charge your creativity. There are only five steps to start writing in Scrivener, once you open the program for the first time.