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This excerpt is from Make a Scene by Jordan E. Rosenfeld. It’s worth checking out if you’re writing fiction!

Let’s talk about an issue that’s sure to rise up in your mind: scene length. One of the benefits of writing in scene form is that the ending of a scene provides a place for the reader to comfortably take a pause. You may wonder when to use a short scene versus a long scene. Once again, the decision rests with you, but we’ll take a quick look at the benefits of using either kind.

Long Scenes

Generally speaking, if a scene runs to more than fifteen pages, it’s on the long side. A scene can be picked up, read, and put back down (though not too easily!), leaving the reader with more information than he had before. Even the most avid reader wants to pause eventually, and scene and chapter breaks offer them chances to do so.

Long scenes don’t need to be avoided, but they should be peppered in sparingly. Too many long scenes in a row will cause your narrative to drag.

Use long scenes in the novel when you want to:

• Intentionally slow down the pace after lots of action or intense dialogue to allow the protagonist and the reader to digest what has happened, and to build new tension and suspense
• Include a lot of big action in a given scene (fights, chases, explosions)—so the scene doesn’t hinge on action alone
• Add a dialogue scene that, in order to feel realistic, needs to run long

Short Scenes

A scene that takes place in ten or fewer pages can comfortably be considered short. Some scenes are as short as a couple of pages. Short scenes often make readers hungry for more. But remember that too many short scenes in a row can make the flow of the plot feel choppy, and disrupt the continuity that John Gardner said creates a dream for the reader.

A short scene has to achieve the same goals as a longer scene, and in less time. It must still contain main characters engaging in actions based upon scene intentions. New information must be revealed that drives the plot forward. The setting must be clear. In the short scene, you have even less room for narrative summary.

You’re best using short scenes when you need to:

• Differentiate one character from another (a secretive, shy, or withdrawn character, for instance, might only get short scenes, while an outspoken character may get longer scenes)
• Pick up the pace right after a long scene
• Leave the reader hungry for more or breathless with suspense
• Include multiple scenes within a chapter
• Create a sense of urgency by dropping bits of information one by one, forcing the reader to keep reading

Whether you go long or short depends on your own stylistic preferences. Just keep in mind that length affects pacing as you decide what kind of flow you want for your manuscript.

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Do you dream about writing a novel one day? Every aspiring writer has to start somewhere. Before you start writing your novel’s first draft, it’s wise to do your research and learn as much as you can. Watch the preview video below from the Writer’s Digest Tutorial titled 8 Things First-Time Novelists Need to Avoid and find out what the most common mistakes are that beginning novelists make. Knowing how to avoid these errors when writing your own novel can save you from frustration in the future.

Eight Mistakes to Avoid When Writing a Novel

Writing a novel is not easy but the journey is often worth it when you have a complete first draft in hand and the opportunity to get published. Publisher and story editor Charlotte Robin Cook and Jon James Miller, an award-winning screenwriter and debut novelist, share the eight mistakes first-time novelists make in the video below. To hear more details and information, purchase the entire tutorial video and discover how to impress agents and editors with your writing.

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If you are writing a novel for the first time, you’ll need to know when and how to end a chapter. Learn about chapter breaks and see examples of some from popular novels in the following excerpt from the book Your First Novel by Ann Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb.

Novels have all different styles of chapter breaks. Some have dozens of short chapters, some have a few huge chapters (often called parts or books), and some have no chapters at all. The chapter break should be placed strategically. If, while constructing your outline, the thought of separating your plot into chapters confuses you or saps your energy, don’t make chapter break decisions yet. Write a first draft of the whole novel, then come back to this section to place your chapter breaks with intention during your rewrite. But if, as you think about your story, the discussion of chapter breaks stimulates your imagination, construct your outline with chapter breaks included.

Take a look at your favorite novels. How did the author break up the story? The most important thing is that at the end of each chapter the reader should be craving the next chapter. Make the reader want to turn the next page. An old-fashioned cliffhanger is not required (though they still work), but tension of some kind is essential. End not where the action lulls but where it is the most dynamic. Give the reader new information right before you cut him off. The following are examples of strategic chapter breaks.

BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY, BY HELEN FIELDING
14 CHAPTERS, 271 PAGES

At the end of chapter “April” Bridget hints that she might be pregnant and then titles the next chapter “Mother-to-Be”—again, we have no self-control. We must read on. It’s especially easy to keep reading Fielding’s novel because the diary entries are often short. Just one more, we tell ourselves. It’s addictive.

LULLABY, BY CHUCK PALAHNIUK
44 CHAPTERS, 260 PAGES

Chapter six: The hero tries a killer poem out on his unsuspecting boss. If it works, the man will be dead before daybreak. Instead of ending the chapter with news of the death, Palahniuk stops right after the hero decides not to try to explain the experiment to his employer.

“We both need some rest, Duncan,” I say, “Maybe we can talk about it in the morning.”

Of course we can’t wait—we have to start chapter seven.

THE PRINCESS BRIDE, BY WILLIAM GOLDMAN
8 CHAPTERS, 399 PAGES

Chapter five: We know one of the characters has spent his whole life trying to track down an anonymous nobleman with six fingers on his right hand. At the end of chapter five another character notices that the man who is about to torture him to death has an extra finger on one hand! It doesn’t matter that chapter five was one hundred pages long, or that chapter six is fifty-nine pages long; we have to turn the page.

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Today’s tip comes from chapter one of The Breakout Novelist by Donald Maass. Learn about premise in this excerpt.

A ton of craft goes into any novel, much more so, I suspect, with a work that can grip the imaginations of millions of readers. At a certain point in the process, even the process of organic writers, choices are made: Story paths are selected, scenes are tossed out, new layers are added. Those choices can make a story larger, deeper, more memorable, or not. You may experience that process as outlining or revision, but whatever you call it, it is planning your story.

Planning a breakout-level novel sounds like magic. It’s not. Notions for stories come to everyone, all over the place, all the time. The trick is not in having a flash of inspiration but in knowing how to develop that scrap into a solid story premise, and, as important, in recognizing when to discard a weak premise that will not support the mighty structure of a breakout novel.

Breakout premises can be built. It is a matter of having the right tools and knowing how to use them. A breakout premise need not be narrative; that is, a mini outline. It can be something smaller, but if so, it must have the energy of a uranium isotope.

It could be the cold bright light of a November afternoon, the feel of a black-edged telegram in a mother’s hand, the putrid smell of a week-old corpse in the trunk of a BMW, a woman’s sworn oath before God that she will never go hungry again. In short, a premise is any single image, moment, feeling, or belief that has enough power and personal meaning for the author to set her story on fire, and propel it like a rocket for hundreds of pages.

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At one time or another, we all find ourselves thinking the same thoughts over and over again. The more we think them, the less fresh and interesting these thoughts become. This can dull our poetry blades significantly. When you want to leave the well-traveled path of your routine thinking for the adventure of an unknown destination, freewriting can take you there.

Freewriting is a way of training yourself to receive and transmit fresh ideas automatically. Just as your body knows how to breathe without conscious effort, your mind knows how to channel inspiration without you thinking about it. But first you may need to break some bad habits that interfere with your ability to send and receive. The goal of freewriting is to move from conscious, deliberate writing to automatic, subconscious writing. Freewriting can liberate you from the ideas of who you are supposed to be on the page and what your writing is supposed to accomplish.

The mechanics of freewriting are simple: Choose a time limit, put your pen to the page or your hands on the keyboard, and don’t stop until your time is up. You can start with any thought or phrase. Don’t try too hard to choose your subject matter; it will choose you. And don’t worry about the quality of what you’re writing. The most important thing is to keep going, even if you have to write the same sentence over and over again until something new arrives.

As the rhythm of a train can rock you to sleep, the rhythm of your writing can lull your conscious mind into silence. Staying in motion creates a physical momentum that releases you from your habits of judging your writing and your ideas, thus giving you access to the raw, buried treasures of your mind. At its best, freewriting gives you yourself, unedited. You gain visibility into the themes, words, colors, and stories that pool up at the back of your mind as they spill forth onto the page.

Think of freewriting as a lightning rod attuning you to the currents coming through. And be careful not to confuse this practice with journal writing. Journals are for recording and examining your thoughts, feelings, and experiences; the goal of freewriting is to sidestep self-conscious self-scrutiny to find what is most alive in your mind.

*This excerpt is from Writing the Life Poetic by Sage Cohen.

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Some of this is Grammar 101, but you’ve got to master the rules in this section for an editor to take you seriously. If these rules are elementary to you, skip them. For everyone else, type them up, print them out, and nail them to your computer monitor.

Rule #1: When a new speaker speaks, start a new paragraph

Right: “Did you hear what happened to Mary last week?” Joseph asked.

“No. Do tell!” cried the little drummer boy.

Wrong: “Did you hear what happened to Mary last week?” Joseph asked.

“No. Do tell!” cried the little drummer boy.

Rule #2: Keep dialogue brief

I’m a devotee of nineteenth-century Russian literature, and one of my favorite chapters is the Grand Inquisitor section of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The success of such a chapter carries with it an assumption that no longer holds true today: One speaker can tell a long story, without interruptions, and his audience will be rapt throughout the telling.

In the age of television, the Internet, e-mail, and even books (remember them?), the art of oral storytelling has gone nearly extinct. Yes, we all still run across the occasional person who can hold a dinner party spellbound with his telling of a story, but there will nonetheless be interruptions, interjections, and asides. In our twenty-first-century world, in fact, no one gets to go on as long as nineteenth-century characters could, so dialogue in which someone speaks without interruption feels awkward and stilted to us.

If it’s necessary to your narrative for someone to give a long speech, there are a number of possible solutions.

1. Make it a real speech.
2. Have him write a letter.
3. Break it up with interjections that further the narrative and/or develop character or relationships at the same time.
4. Consider why it’s necessary for this information to be imparted this way. If it’s important, perhaps it should be done in a scene. (If doing such a scene presents a point-of-view problem, have someone who’s there write a letter.)

Rule #3: Always put terminal punctuation (commas, periods) inside the quotation marks

This one’s simple. Note where the comma and period appear in each example and then commit the above to memory.
Right: “I wonder,” she said, “if he is going to show up.”
Wrong: “I wonder”, she said, “if he is going to show up”.

*This excerpt is from Mind of Your Story by Lisa Lenard-Cook.

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A Checklist for Marketing

1. You can’t write for it if you haven’t read it. Go to the local library or newsstand and seek out the publications
2. No one starts at the top. Find your own level, work in it, then work up out of it.
3. Start with local newspapers and magazines, small publications, regional travel magazines, and publications with a small editorial staff. Write for your high school or college paper, the alumni magazine, a community newspaper. Use the experience to tackle more complex writing projects for broader publications.
4. Don’t give your work away. If the publication doesn’t offer a fee, ask for a subscription, free advertising, or printing services in exchange for your articles. No matter how small the honorarium or in-kind service, you’ll feel better if you receive something for your work and you’ll be respected for your professionalism.

*This excerpt is from from Travel Writing by L. Peat O’Neil. Worth looking into if you want to become a freelance or professional travel writer.

If you are interested in corporate writing, read today’s tip of the day from 102 Ways To Earn Money Writing 1,500 Words or Less by I.J. Schecter. Before accepting any writing assignment, you should know what your rate is and have a freelance writing contract ready for each client/project.

Determining Your Freelance Writing Rate

When your work is accepted by newspapers, magazines, or literary journals, you’ll have little say about what you’re paid. Once you become established, you’ll earn a bit of wiggle room when it comes to negotiating rates upward, but only a bit. For the most part, rates are set. But when you write for the corporate market, it’s you alone who determines what to quote for a given assignment or project, and this will be based on the hourly rate you determine for yourself. Writer’s Market lists low, high, and average rates for every type of writing you can think of. Base your hourly rate on this data. When people ask what you charge, don’t be sheepish. Answer quickly and firmly. The more you sound like you believe in the value of your services, the more potential clients will believe it, too.

Refer to the What Do I Charge? chart in Writer’s Market and notice it talks in terms of hours, not dollars. This is because (a) every writer’s rate will be different, so it isn’t fair to assign a blanket dollar amount to a specific type of project, and (b) within the same type of project there will be different sizes of projects.

A presentation might be five slides long or fifty; a speech might be three minutes long or thirty. So when you quote on a project, do it based on a fair assessment of how many hours of your time you think it will require. Don’t approach a project thinking “How much money do I want to make off this?” because you’ll inevitably skew your own estimates according to a number of factors, including how much money you do or don’t have flowing in at a given point. That will lead to inconsistency in your quoting, which clients will come to recognize. But quote according to a true projection of the hours you’ll need to do the project and do it well, and clients will come back again and again.

Create a Standard Writing Contract

Develop your own standard freelance agreement so you’re never in danger of doing a project without having something in writing. (No pun intended.) Companies are often rushed to complete their projects, and the last thing the middle manager assigned to find a writer wants to do is go through the extra step of having to prepare a formal agreement just to allow you to edit his marketing brochure. Send him your own agreement instead, outlining clearly the nature of the project, the expectations on your part, the agreed fee and deadline, and the set number of rounds of revisions before extra time kicks in. This document doesn’t have to be long—mine is barely two pages. The important thing is that you get a signature. You may be reading this and thinking it’s a giant pain in the rear end to create a contract every time you get a corporate assignment.

Consider this scenario: The manager who’s contacted you to write a long marketing piece, along with Web site copy, for a total fee of $3,500 has bolted from his company for a position elsewhere. The marketing piece has been handed off to someone else, and this person doesn’t feel that the expense of a writer is worthwhile. If you had only a verbal agreement with the previous person, you’ve just lost $3,500. If you got it in writing, you’ve made $3,500.

That’s the more elaborate scenario. The much simpler, and more frequent one, involves your having to chase a client for payment. It would be nice if this never happened, but any veteran freelancer can tell you more stories than she’d like about delinquent clients. Without signed agreements, getting them to pay is like trying to précis Hemingway. Get all your corporate assignments in writing and you’ll never have to worry.

To learn more about writing for magazines, newspapers, literary outlets and everything else under the sun, get your own copy of this book today!

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You need a clear reason for writing an epilogue, and it cannot be used to simply tie up loose ends, which you should do during your falling action. Without a proper purpose for including one, an epilogue might come across as anti-climatic deadweight, inadvertently signaling to your reader that you’re afraid your ending is so weak that he won’t be able extrapolate meaning from it without help. To avoid such potential problems, make sure your epilogue is enhancing your story in one or more of the following ways.

• Wrapping up story events after a traumatic or violent climax. This is an especially important technique when the ending is abrupt or surprising, as when a major character dies, or when the fate of the characters is not clearly depicted. If your ending raises more questions than it answers, you will need to rewrite it or create an epilogue to resolve this problem.

• Highlighting consequences and results of story events. Perhaps you’ve written a comeuppance story, or the ending features a major revelation. The epilogue will serve to assure the reader that justice has been dispensed.

• Providing important information that wasn’t covered in the climax or denouement. If a character was ailing in the story, you might want to explain his fate. Or, if a character becomes pregnant, the epilogue can explain the birth of the child. This can work especially well if the father dies or the child has special significance to the story.

• Suggesting the future for the protagonist and other characters. This is an important consideration in series fiction or if you’re planning a sequel. An epilogue might also be appropriate if a character undergoes severe physical, emotional, or psychological trauma, to assure the readers of his full or partial recovery.

• Making the story seem realistic. For example, if you’ve killed off a character, the epilogue can be written by another character to explain how things went down. Or, if you’re writing a story and the ending was literally explosive, the epilogue assures readers that the protagonist has survived.

• Providing data on your large cast of characters, especially if you’ve written a sweeping historical or epic. Often, with a large cast, it’s difficult to suggest the fate of every character. In Vanity Fair, William Thackeray wrote an epilogue titled “Which Contains Births, Marriages, and Deaths.” While this may seem old-fashioned to some readers, in a highly complex novel you can sometimes justify following the cast into the future.

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Today’s tip of the day comes from Setting and Keeping Goals, a chapter in Book in a Month by Victoria Lynn Schmidt. Here she discusses how to write the book you were meant to write.

If you are aware ahead of time that you may be working on a story that is not in line with who you are as a writer—say, if you’ve been contracted to write in a genre you’re unfamiliar with—then you can compensate for it not only by giving yourself more time to complete the story, but also by recognizing blocks and resistance as they come up. That way, you will understand why you feel blocked, and you can then either write the story anyway or give yourself permission to shape your storyline so it fits better with who you are as a writer. It’s called slanting your project, tweaking it a bit to get more of “you” into it. Many writers who work for hire do this. They will take any writing job they are offered, but they immediately pick through the idea and inject their own ideas and themes into it. This is what makes us unique, what adds style to our work. Knowing what projects not to become involved in, as well as what projects to pursue, is the biggest key to a fabulous writing career.

Do you think Nora Roberts and Barbara Cartland would have been so prolific if they wrote in a vastly different genre and topic area? Most likely, they would have slanted any book they wrote into the mold of who they were as writers. This is why you can take any story idea, give it to ten different writers, and get back ten different versions of it! Who you are as a writer will always come through your work. Accept and embrace that.

Now that you know who you are as a writer and what is important to you, take that information and turn it into an overall career goal in first or third person. For example:

• I want to write X stories with Y and Z. (I want write sensual stories with suspense and intrigue.)
• X and Y are what writer Z is all about. (Spunky heroines and slapstick comedy are what writer Jack Doe is all about.)

Does any of this sound familiar? It should! You have all been told that you need to boil your ideas down into a one-sentence pitch. Well, this is the one-sentence pitch of yourself. It is just as important to pitch
yourself as it is to pitch your story. You don’t want to be a one-hit wonder. Pitching yourself tells people about your career; pitching your book just tells them about that one book.

Now you try writing a one sentence pitch.

If Jack Doe is hired to write a horror novel, he can create a spunky heroine with one or two slapstick moments and make the story his own.  He won’t struggle as much in the beginning to write this horror book because he knows what he likes to write about. He knows what will make this an enjoyable experience for him. Can you imagine how he might struggle if he couldn’t put his finger on what he didn’t like about this horror project? Instead, he can jump right in with suggestions and ideas for the publisher. (Remember, this statement about who you are as a writ

Do you wonder want readers want? In today’s writing tip, you’ll discover the 21 key traits of best-selling fiction excerpted from The Writer’s Little Helper by James V. Smith, Jr.

The 21 Key Traits of Best-Selling Fiction

1. Utility (writing about things that people will use in their lives)
2. Information (facts people must have to place your writing in context)
3. Substance (the relative value or weight in any piece of writing)
4. Focus (the power to bring an issue into clear view)
5. Logic (a coherent system for making your points)
6. A sense of connection (the stupid power of personal involvement)
7. A compelling style (writing in a way that engages)
8. A sense of humor (wit or at least irony)
9. Simplicity (clarity and focus on a single idea)
10. Entertainment (the power to get people to enjoy what you write)
11. A fast pace (the ability to make your writing feel like a quick read)
12. Imagery (the power to create pictures with words)
13. Creativity (the ability to invent)
14. Excitement (writing with energy that infects a reader with your own enthusiasm)
15. Comfort (writing that imparts a sense of well-being)
16. Happiness (writing that gives joy)
17. Truth (or at least fairness)
18. Writing that provokes (writing to make people think or act)
19. Active, memorable writing (the poetry in your prose)
20. A sense of Wow! (the wonder your writing imparts on a reader)
21. Transcendence (writing that elevates with its heroism, justice, beauty, honor)

To sell your fiction, you must pay attention to the Key Traits of Best-Selling Fiction. FYI, the twenty-one traits are arranged in a kind of rough order.

• Appeals to the intellect. The first five: utility to logic. To you, the writer, they refer to how you research, organize, and structure your story. These are the large-scale mechanics of a novel.

• Appeals to the emotions. From a sense of connection to excitement. These are the ways you engage a reader to create buzz. Do these things right, and people will talk about your novel, selling it to others.

• Appeals to the soul. Comfort through transcendence. With these traits you examine whether your writing matters, whether it lasts, whether it elevates you to the next level as a novelist.

Where do the 21 key traits come from?

They come from the most prolific, most complete, most accessible, most reliable survey of book readers in the world. They come from my study of the thousands of reader reviews on Amazon.com.

Reliable? Yes. Why? Because most reviewers visit a page to write reviews based on their emotional reactions to books. They either love a book or hate it. They were either swept away by the characters and story and language. Or they felt cheated by the author. Either way, they have to

If you aspire to write a fiction novel and get published the traditional way, you’ll need to know what to do before you query an agent. Today’s tip comes from Get an Agent, a digital resource meant for any writer who desires to learn more about literary agents and publishing. Here are 10 tips on preparing your fiction book, novel, or short story for submission:

1. Finish your novel or short-story collection. An agent can do nothing for fiction without a finished product.
2. Revise your manuscript. Seek critiques from other writers to ensure your work is as polished as possible.
3. Proofread. Don’t ruin a potential relationship with an agent by submitting work that contains typos or poor grammar.
4. Publish short stories or novel excerpts in literary journals, which will prove to prospective agents that editors see quality in your writing.
5. Research to find the agents or writers whose works you admire or are similar to yours.
6. Use the Internet and resources like Guide to Literary Agents to construct a list of agents who are open to new writers and looking for your category of fiction.
7. Rank your list according to the agents most suitable for you and your work.
8. Write your novel synopsis.
9. Write your query letter. As an agent’s first impression of you, this brief letter should be polished and to the point.
10. Educate yourself about the business of agents so you will be prepared to act on any offer.

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If you already write a blog or are thinking of creating one, you’ll need to know how to attract and keep your readers interested. Today’s tip comes from Christina Katz’s book Get Known Before the Book Deal. Use these tips to help you write fresh content that lures your readers back for more:

1. Keep your content fresh. Don’t blog about what everyone else is blogging about. Respond to a buzz topic with your fresh perspective, drawing on your expertise. Give folks something to think about that they won’t find anywhere else.
2. Avoid politics, religion, or anything that might offend your readers, if none of these are your expertise. (Learned this the hard way.)
3. One more time with emotion: Consider what your audience cares deeply about and revisit those topics often. Encourage, inspire, cajole.
4. Use reporting techniques. Can you back that up with a fact? Then go ahead. Trends, statistics, news, and current events are all more interesting with a few facts sprinkled in.
5. Demystify whenever possible. The tip and list forms work well for this.
6. Offer round-ups of your best previous posts.
7. Optimize your blog. Use feeds that allow folks to subscribe. Include links to subscribe to any newsletters you offer.
8. Create a relevant and enticing list of related blogs (blogroll). Visit those blogs regularly and leave comments.
9. Think community. If your blog seems to be just you talking to you, people will not be inclined to stay. Think we.
10. Post rhythmically. Your readers don’t want to come back every day if you are only going to post every other day. Always post consistently.
11. Avoid blogging burnout by utilizing guest bloggers and co-bloggers, but don’t disappear if your audience came to hear you.
12. Be visual. Add quality photos, videos, and podcasts. Remember that you are producing your own “show.” What would you come back for?
13. Hit the high notes. When good things happen, share them. This keeps your blog emotionally compelling and fun.
14. Write short and punchy. Then spell check.
15. Make recommendations. Write top-ten lists. Share books and quotes you like. Be a filter for folks who want more on your topic.
16. Write longer posts in serial fashion (for example, one tip per day for a certain number of days). People will return to catch your next point.

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Are you new to writing and exploring what type of writing you want to do? This eBook excerpt, How Do I Start a Freelance Career?, from the Beginning Writer’s Answer Book, covers everything from freelance writing to technical writing and writing for niches – such as comic strips, book reviews, and more!

In this post, we’ve picked a couple of frequently asked questions about freelance writing and making money. Enjoy!

For many years, I’ve had a deep-seated desire to write, and I’d love to break in to the field and make enough money to support my family. How much money can I make freelancing?

A lot of money can be made by freelancing, but most writers receive fairly little income while they perfect their writing and marketing abilities. There are hundreds of full-time freelancers who make good livings but who started slow—freelancing on the side while holding down a day job. Your best bet is to begin with magazine articles, since the market is large and varied, and fodder for articles is everywhere.

What are the advantages and disadvantages I might face as a full-time freelance writer?

There are many advantages to being a full-time freelance writer. You are your own boss. You control your working hours and, in a sense, the amount of money you make. You practice as a profession the thing you enjoy most. You may have much more opportunity to be creative than if you worked as a staff writer. You choose what you want to write about, and get paid for learning something new through research. You can work at home, and if you’re a parent, you can save on childcare expenses. In addition, the research involved in writing can bring you into contact with interesting, stimulating people.

On the other hand, most writers face innumerable rejections (and no income) before making their first sale. To avoid losing faith in yourself and your career at this stage, it helps if you are thick-skinned, self-confident, and persistent. Unlike a job in a company, freelance work does not bring regular paychecks in regular amounts. Further, you are responsible for collecting your own payments. You receive no fringe benefits, such as the insurance and retirement benefits that company employees receive. Being self-employed, you must spend part of your working time on administrative tasks like bookkeeping and filing income tax and social security forms.

Writers usually work alone, and this can be a disadvantage (depending on your personality), especially after a number of days without contact with your colleagues. If you’re married, it’s best to have a spouse who approves of your career and all it entails, since your irregular working hours and irregular income will affect him or her.

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Today’s tip of the day comes from Grammatically Correct and describes some techniques for improving your writing style and for assessing how well your efforts are succeeding. Not all these strategies will be right for everyone, but it can’t hurt to at least consider them.

Focus on the whole as well as the parts

Any time you add or revise some words, reread what surrounds them to ensure that everything else still fits. Often, a change in one place will necessitate a change in another. Naturally you must focus on each line as you create it, but as soon as you have the first draft in place, back up a few lines and read through the earlier text again. You will sometimes find that the latest addition doesn’t fit in quite as it should—perhaps it restates a point already made, or doesn’t make a smooth enough transition from what came before.

As you form each new sentence, keep going back and rereading it from the start to ensure that all its elements mesh together. As you form each new paragraph, keep rereading it from its first line to see how its sentences fit together: perhaps the topic shifts enough that the paragraph should be broken up, or perhaps a particular word now is repeated too many times within a short space.

Put your work aside for a while and then come back to it

You may be confident that you have polished your words into their final form, only to find that when you look at them a little later, problems jump out: illogical connections, clumsy sentence structures, a strained-sounding tone, subtle grammatical errors. A lapse of time enables you to come back to your work with a more objective eye. A day or more away is ideal, but even a few hours can make a difference.

Have someone else look your work over

Any writer, no matter how skilled, can benefit from getting a second opinion, because by definition one is always too close to one’s own work. Given that any writing is ultimately intended for other people’s consumption, it only makes sense to find out how other people perceive it. The individual whose opinion you seek need not be a better writer than you, since the goal is not necessarily to have this person correct or revise what you have done. Rather, it is to provide you with feedback on how your points and your tone are coming across. If your critic doesn’t get your jokes, or finds a character you meant to be funny and sympathetic merely irritating, or can’t follow some instruction because you left out a step you thought would be perfectly obvious to anybody—at least consider the possibility of making changes (and do your best to remain on speaking terms afterward). A professional editor is ideal, but if this is not practical or affordable, select someone whose opinion you respect and who represents your intended readership as nearly as possible.

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Building a fire is a great illustration for authors who want to sell more books. For example, if you want to start a fire, experts agree that the first step is to gather together kindling. Once you light a small pile of this tinder, the result is a flame so intense that it quickly spreads and ignites the larger branches around it. As the larger branches catch fire, they generate enough energy to ignite a large log. And if that resulting fire is left uncontrolled, the flames can get so powerful that they create a wildfire that sweeps through the entire forest.

If you want to sell books like wildfire, utilize the same principle. Start by identifying and igniting an initial group of readers (your kindling) who get so excited that they turn into raving fans. I like to call them “word-of-mouth warriors.” These are people who will forcefully take up the cause to tell others about your book. You don’t have to ask them to promote. They will do it willingly, because the value of your book touches an emotional fuel that lights them into action. They want to tell others how your book improved their life. Or they want the joy of being the first person to tell others about your book, which makes them feel cool (never underestimate a person’s desire to be seen as influential).

A “kindling” reader is a person who feels so excited or grateful for your message that they want to share their experience with others. This excited influence acts like a flame that spreads interest to new and larger groups of people. A domino effect occurs, and the excitement about your book expands outward from your raving fans to other readers they know.

To create a similar dynamic for your book, the question you must ask is, “Who needs my value the most?” You could even turn the question around and ask, “Who stands to lose the most if they never get my value?” Your answers to these questions help identify the people most likely to read your book, burn hot with excitement, and enthusiastically tell others. They define the tinder needed to start your own wildfire.

* Learn how to find your kindling readers and start a blaze of book sales with Rob Eagar’s new resource from Writer’s Digest, Sell Your Book Like Wildfire.

I’ve got a little secret to share. What if I told you that marketing and selling your books might be a lot easier than you think? You may not believe me, but here’s the secret. Sometimes people don’t need much convincing to buy a book. Sometimes they need only one little reason, and nothing more.

For example, how many times have you ever waited to buy a book until you could stop by a library or bookstore and read through half of the chapters first? Probably never. How many times have you ever bought a book without reading one page of it? Probably a lot. I bet you’ve even bought a book without ever holding it in your hands. That’s because you heard the author speak about it at an event or got a word-of-mouth recommendation that drove you to make the purchase online.

Many people will buy a book without ever seeing the content. They just need one convincing reason to buy. As an author, you can create these persuasive reasons that tip the buying scale in your favor. What’s the trick? Develop “built-in book marketing tools,” which are nuggets of content designed to spike reader interest that any author, including fiction, can deliberately place into a manuscript. How do you create an effective book marketing tool? Follow these three guidelines:

1. A built-in book marketing tool is a concise segment of content that provides the reader with immediate value – and I stress the word “immediate.” The user must receive direct benefit in that moment to capture his or her interest. Benefits could include learning something new, solving a problem, getting behind-the-scenes access, or enjoying humor.

2. A built-in book marketing tool must consist of specific content that the reader can appreciate as-is. The tool must be self-contained and able to provide value independent of the book itself. You don’t want your marketing tool to require another step in order for the reader to experience value, or they’ll think you’re pulling a bait-and-switch. Thus your tool won’t create the intended result to drive sales. Make sure the tool can impress people on its own.

3. A built-in book marketing tool should be written in a format that’s easy for readers to forward to others. You insert the content into your manuscript. But you will get greater response if you also turn the same tool into a separate promotional piece outside of your book, such as a handout, website quiz, free article, checklist, appendix, photo section, resource guide, etc. When you put these tools in a portable format, you enable people to spread word of mouth and drive sales.

* For a detailed list of 15 different types of book marketing tools that any author can use, check out the new resource from Writer’s Digest by Rob Eagar called Sell Your Book Like Wildfire.

Don’t write another cliché novel! Learn what to avoid from 179 Ways to Save a Novel by Peter Selgin.

A writer’s job is to write stories—not to steal or borrow them and, with a coat of fresh paint, pawn them off as original. That should be obvious, but it’s not always completely clear. Our own private thoughts, dreams, intuitions, and fantasies are inevitably colored by what Jung called the collective unconscious— the vast, reservoir-like body of shared human experiences, of myths, symbols, and legends.

Take this story set in Spanish Harlem, where Emilio Bermudez, a rookie fresh from the police academy, stakes out a bodega with his partner Joe. While on duty Emilio falls hard for Dulce, the lovely sister of the drug-dealing bodega owner.

Need I fill in the rest? In the climactic drug bust, Joe sees Dulce reach for a “weapon” and fires. The bullet goes straight through her heart. Dulce had been reaching innocently for the love note Emilio had sent her, and she dies in Emilio’s arms.

If these characters and their situation seem familiar, they are. We’ve all seen similar stories a hundred times. Most sensational subjects have been treated to death. Result: a minefield of clichés. And, as Martin Amis tells us, “All good writing is a war against cliché.”

The story’s problems might be partially redeemed by crisp dialogue, vivid descriptions, and an impeccable edgy style—but the plain fact is, they shouldn’t be solved. This clichéd rose is wilted down to its thorns. Steer clear of tired plots and you, your characters, and your readers will avoid all kinds of heartache.

This writing tip is from 179 Ways To Save a Novel by Peter Selgin. Buy this book and learn:

• The difference between a memoir and fiction
• How to structure your story and create a plot
• Writing style tips

Buy 179 Ways to Save a Novel now!

Are you in the middle of writing your story and wondering how to write a scene that indicates a turning point? Learn about turning points and how to show them within your story from Laurie Alberts, author of Showing & Telling.

Turning points in the action or the character’s emotions must be rendered in scenes rather than summary. Can you imagine Rhett Butler’s famous line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” in Gone With the Wind relayed in summary instead of in the vivid scene in which Scarlett finally decides she loves him but Rhett has had enough and walks out on her?

In Herman Melville’s classic story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” a lot of initial summary describes the members of the narrator’s office, but when the narrator asks his (until this point accommodating) clerk, Bartleby, to do some copying, and Bartleby shakes the narrator’s little world by saying “I would prefer not to,” a scene conveys this turning point. After Bartleby’s refusal, the story has changed direction.

Turning points can be shown via actions, as when the teenage girl alone in her family’s house in Joyce Carol Oates’s story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” walks out the door to join the terrifying stalker Arnold Friend.

Turning points can occur without direct confrontation. A turning point scene might be wholly internal, as when it leads up to a character making an important decision or coming to see the truth about a situation without necessarily voicing that awareness. If Sally gets called to the principal’s office and is reprimanded and put on probation, and while the principal is chastising her she decides to quit her job, this would be a turning point. There’s been no open confrontation (though there’s plenty of conflict), Sally has said nothing, but the event has led to her decision to quit—that’s a turning point scene.

Think about what point in your narrative your protagonist or narrator reaches a turning point. Your turning point scene—and it must be a scene, not a summary—can show this change in the character’s life or consciousness through thoughts, action, or dialogue. But it must grow naturally out of what comes before so that the turning point is credible. In other words, if you’re going to show a girl walking out of her house to join a scary stalker, you better have already shown us that this stalker has, through terror and threats of reprisals on her family, broken this girl’s will. You want your readers to believe in the turning point, and they won’t if it comes out of thin air.

This excerpt is from Showing & Telling by Laurie Alberts. Buy this book and discover:

• The purposes of scenes
• Five types of scenes—flashback, suspense, resolution, conflict, and ones that introduce character
• How to write the beginning, middle, and end of a scene
• Practice exercises for writing scenes
• What summary is and how to use it to set up a scene

Buy Showing & Telling now!

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Are you thinking of writing a romance novel or in the planning stages of writing one? Learn what conflict is and how to use it in your romance novel. Today’s tip of the day comes from On Writing Romance by Leigh Michaels.

What Is Conflict?

Conflict is the difficulty between the hero and heroine that threatens to keep
them from getting together. What causes the hero and heroine to be at odds with each other? What prevents them from being too comfortable? What do they disagree about? What do the hero and heroine have at stake? Why is this difficulty so important to each of them? Why is it important to the readers?

What Conflict Is Not

Conflict is not:

• Fighting, arguing, or disagreeing. Sometimes conflict is expressed in heated discussions or shouting matches, but two people can be locked in conflict without ever raising their voices, and they can also bicker incessantly without ever addressing an important issue.
• A delay. An event that simply delays a hero’s or heroine’s progress toward a goal is only an incident. If another character sidetracks the heroine to talk about an unrelated problem, and this discussion keeps her from confronting the hero, that’s not conflict.
• Failure to communicate. Misunderstanding each other, making wrong assumptions, jumping to conclusions, or wrongly judging one another are not illustrations of conflict, but of the hero and heroine’s inability to make themselves clear.
• The trouble-causing interference of another person. If the meddling of another person causes problems, the main characters can appear too passive to take charge of their own lives or stand up for themselves.
• A main character’s unwillingness to admit that the other person is attractive. Though romance characters attempt to fight off their attraction, conflict lies in the underlying reasons why it seems inappropriate or unwise to fall in love with this person.

Today’s excerpt is from On Writing Romance by Leigh Michaels. If you enjoyed this tip, buy this book and learn:

• The difference between a true romance novel and a novel that includes a love story
• The different types of romance novels
• General research strategies to help you decide what your characters can and can’t do and what events the story will involve
• The four crucial basics that make up a romance novel
• How to start your story
• When and how to write love scenes
• Strategies and tips for marketing your romance novel

Buy On Writing Romance Novel now!

The most disheartening place to be and feel as a writer is stuck. And the most possible place to be is in motion—moving toward our goals. At every turn, we have a choice in how we negotiate the demands of our lives with our own expectations for our writing practice. And no one is better equipped to help you navigate such challenges than you.

Managing Deadlines

As you’re establishing good deadline habits, you might want to exaggerate your deadline and time-management awareness to ensure that you don’t miss anything important—especially if you have multiple projects going with a range of unrelated deadlines. Why? Because honoring your deadlines is respectful to yourself and the people you’re working with. Meeting deadlines will give you and your colleagues, clients, editors, and publishers confidence in your ability to follow through. That’s the kind of writer who gets hired a second time.

Make a Writing Schedule

You may or may not be a “perform to a schedule” type of writer. Largely, this will depend on who you are, how you write, and what you’re writing. For example, if you are writing poetry, there’s a good chance that you’re scratching your head about this suggestion – unless, of course you owe manuscript revisions by a certain date. But if you’ve promised a business that they’ll have an entire website worth of content in three weeks, you (and the client) will be well served knowing exactly how you’re going to get there.

No matter what type of writing you’re doing, whether there is an external deadline or not, a schedule can help. I have come to appreciate schedules as little maps of the possible to guide us in the deep and sometimes overwhelming waters of time. When I have a big project (let’s say a book) and a somewhat long-term timeline (let’s say six months) and some other significant work and family commitments (including a full-time freelance writing career, part-time teaching, a husband, toddler, three cats, and two dogs) the fact of the matter is that I need to see––clear as a successful simile––where and how the writing time for the book is going to fit into my life. So I make a treasure map for arriving at the doorstep of this finished book on the date promised. When taken out of its romantic mood lighting, this map is simply a schedule.

What I mean by a schedule, for something like a book, is that I set both targets and timing. Let’s say the book has twenty chapters, and I plan to write one chapter per week over the course of twenty weeks, then spend the last four weeks revising. I’d block off in my computer calendar the hours I expect to spend writing that chapter each week.  For me, the greatest value of this process is having hard proof that there are actually enough hours in my life to accomplish what I have set out to do.

When I see those orange blocks of “write book” time floating through the days and nights of my computer calendar, a sense of calm comes over me. I can see my path of progress; I can trust it will get done. And even if I don’t choose to stick to the schedule in a given week, or ever, I still have that visual map of how my current life could shift to accommodate something new – and a general sense of what will be required of me to make that happen. And that lends confidence and comfort as I enter the unknown.

Do you want to write a novel? In addition to creating a solid plot, you are also going to need a strong concept for your novel. Wondering how to conceptualize your story? Todd A. Stone, author of the Novelist’s Boot Camp, shares essential elements for developing a story’s concept.

Developing A Story’s Concept

One common civilian technique for developing an idea for a novel is fairly straightforward: Start with a bit of information that piques your interest, then ask What if? But the answers to the What if? questions you asked in the civilian world of writing just aren’t strong enough to base a novel on. Instead, you need something stronger—you need to move from What if? to a comprehensive concept.

A comprehensive concept is a foundation builder. It is a short statement that combines the following four essential elements to form a strong base for your complex novel: (1) genre, (2) main character, (3) opposition, and (4) macro setting. You can arrange these elements, in any order.

Examples of Story Concepts From Popular Novels

Here are some example comprehensive concept statements formulated from popular novels.

In a mystery [genre] set in modern Los Angeles [macro setting], a female
bomb squad technician [main character] pursues a mad bomber [opposition]
who killed her partner.
—Demolition Angel by Robert Crais

A by-the-book Army officer and a break-the-rules Green Beret [main
characters] battle a new Nazi Fourth Reich [opposition] in a techno-thriller
[genre] set a newly united Germany [macro setting].
—Kriegspiel by Todd A. Stone

Now, to go from What if? to comprehensive concept, you need to leverage the what in What if? That is, begin with your scrap of information—idea, person, place, thing, tidbit of news, slice of history, scientific observation, or whatever else that sticks and inspires you—then ask specific What if? questions designed to formulate each of the four elements of your comprehensive concept.

For example, start with this fictional news item: Private plan crashes. No pilot found. Now, instead of asking yourself random What if? questions and allowing your train of thought to pick its own destination, focus and direct your What if? questions to determine genre, initial main character, opposition, and macro setting. You can address these four elements in any order.

• Genre: What role could this fact play in a horror story? What role could this fact play in a spy novel?
• Opposition: In a horror story, what kind of monster might be involved? What could that monster do to make planes crash and pilots vanish?
• Main Character: What if the protagonist was the missing pilot? What could be his reason for disappearing? What role could his disappearance play in his discovery and pursuit of the monster? What would the main character do to track and kill this kind of monster?
• Macro Setting: What kind of setting might be interesting for this story?

Arrange your answers to form a comprehensive concept statement. As long as you focus your questions on genre, main character, opposition, and macro setting, your novel concept will be strong enough that you can confidently mo

If you’re interested in breaking the mold with your character, there is no single criterion for a bitch. However, you might want to consider making several of her dominant traits negative or what society has typically not expected of females. For example, her traits might include being manipulating, selfish, cunning, power-seeking, or vengeful. Or, perhaps your bitch character cannot connect to others emotionally, or she is sexually insatiable. Or maybe she’s simply a nonconformist who is opinionated, mouthy, aggressive, ambitious, or confident.

How to Create a Bitchy Character

The juxtaposition of what women are supposed to be—sweet, feminine, compliant, and vulnerable—and what they are truly capable of being—tough, athletic, powerful, and violent—creates a natural friction that can yield fascinating results in fiction. With this in mind, you might want to brew a blend of traits that hold contradictions or create conflict. Perhaps your character is ambitious, yet is living at a time in history or in a culture where women have few options to express their ambitions.

Another aspect that cannot be ignored is that today, women’s lives are shaped similarly to men’s lives—most women leave the house each morning for their nine-to-five jobs, they explore the world independently, and they experience sex outside of marriage. So, because women face the same pressures and experiences of men, they might not fit into the archetypes of storytelling and instead might be feeling the disquiet of our times. Like men, they might feel sexual restlessness. Or they might be searching for their authentic self, questioning what fulfillment means for them. Or their main conflicts might be within, or they feel isolated or adrift in their roles. Or, if they’re working mothers, the double demands of job and family might lead them to act out.

As an author in today’s society, you have much more latitude than writers of previous generations when it comes to writing female characters, and you can write stories, especially endings, that don’t provide easy answers and don’t punish women for fl outing convention. Perhaps your bitch character is not a clear-cut bad ass to focus the reader’s anger on. Perhaps she can raise much more complicated truths or issues, and thus create a much more interesting story.

Your characters can confront moral dilemmas and hot-button issues; form complex relationships; question their unfolding identities; be tempted by sin or crime; be delighted by ordinary or forbidden pleasures; or struggle with illness, aging, fidelity, and power. In other words, your characters can face universal themes and issues.

Tips For Writing Strong Female Characters

When writing a female character who is a bad ass, you must decide if you want the reader to question preconceived assumptions about women, or if you want the reader to fear or admire her. Perhaps you want to write about especially spunky women because you admire this trait. But then maybe your aim is that the reader asks how she dare be so uppity or bold. This might require that she’s particularly abrasive, or that the story is set in previous centuries when such behavior was typically frowned on.

Do you want your reader to be appalled when your bitch character dares not to follow the rules? Or do you want the reader to be silently applauding from the sidelines? If your character has children, you need to make clear decisions about how she sees her place as a mother, even if that means she’s ambivalent about motherhood. So if your bitch leaves h

If you are pondering whether or not you can launch a writing career and be a mom, today’s tip of the day is for you. Christina Katz, author of Writer Mama, shares these tips for freelance writing from chapter two.

Freelancing teaches you valuable lessons about your business strengths and weaknesses while helping you establish published credits. By practicing some basic journalism skills, you can work your way up the writing ranks and increase your chances of literary success in the short and long run. By freelancing, you will learn about and get used to:

• Partnering with editors and being edited
• Taking assignments and meeting deadlines
• Finding your unique style and voice
• Strengthening your writing craft
• Being self-employed
• Taking pride in doing your best work

If that doesn’t convince you, here are a couple more benefits:

Freelancing reduces mommy mush-mind. One of the most distressing things about being the mother of young children is that your brain often feels like it has turned to mush. Moms spend so much time goo-goo-ga-ga-ing that, when reintroduced to the company of adults, it’s easy to feel like a kid at the grownups’ table. Writing with specific short-term goals in mind is a mental challenge and an outlet for creativity, inspirations, and ideas, which feels especially good when what you hear all day begins with “Hey mommy! Hey mama! Hey mom!” So give your mind an adult-level workout and see how you feel afterward. The opportunity to focus on a goal will help your mind feel sharper, and soon you’ll be back among the articulate!

Freelancing is a mental stress-buster. Writing short articles can help you break up the arduous monotonous tasks that comprise day-to-day life as a mother. Mixing up writing breaks with daily chores can help you focus, take your mind off problems, and even help you work through some of these crises that are bound to crop up when you’re the only adult home all day.

And remember, every writer has to start somewhere. This isn’t the end of the road, it’s just the beginning! Julia Cameron started out as a journalist. Anne Lamott wrote restaurant reviews. Barbara Kingsolver credits journalism with forcing her away from her computer to meet people she would not otherwise see.

Start simple, diversify later. Novelist Jennie Shortridge, author of Eating Heaven and Riding With the Queen, didn’t start out as a novelist; she simply knew that was where she wanted to end up.

Start short, come back to short later. Plenty of writers, having scaled the mountain called Writing a Book, continue to write articles because it provides welcome mental relief (not to mention money) from longer, more arduous projects. Author and freelancer Wendy Burt has published more than five hundred articles, and despite her author status, she still returns to the short stuff to keep herself happily productive. “On any given day I will be working on three or four projects–usually in different genres. If I’ve got a boring business article to edit, I’ll take a break to work on some fun greeting cards or bumper sticker ideas. I’ll go back to editing the business article then ‘reward’ myself by working on a short story or filler,” she says.

Flexibility is good. Show me a gro

No matter what type of writing you do–fiction, nonfiction, or freelance–you should expect to revise your work. Learn four essential tips for revising your work from Christina Katz, author of The Writer’s Workout.

When you are a professional writer, you spend at least half of your time rewriting, likely even more time than you spend drafting new work. But the process of rewriting needn’t be tedious and nitpicky. So go ahead, draft, cut, rearrange, review, tweak, tighten, and then work your way down this list.

4 Key Revision Tips For Writers

Here are some general tips to getting to your best drafts quickly.

1. Use your spell-check, grammar check, and check your spacing. Run all three of these checks a couple of times, once right after your first draft and once right before you turn your work in.

2. Keep your format simple. Single space. No all-bold or all-italic. Justified left. Put your title and byline in bold. Use Times New Roman, Times, or Helvetica as your font. Never use tabs or insert manual spacing. Forget any fancy formatting. Sidebars go at the bottom with the subhead, “Sidebar.” That’s it. No box or special bullet points. Remember that you will often submit in an e-mail, which would mess up any formatting anyway.

3. Read your draft out loud once or twice before you turn it in. The places where your tongue trips and your voice doesn’t flow indicate that you need a few more tweaks before your draft is really done.

4. Have someone else read your piece before you turn it in. Ask them if the article is clear and error free. Ask them if they have any questions after reading it. (Your article should answer questions, not prompt them.) If the reader’s concerns are irrelevant, that’s okay. Jot them down if they spark any ideas for you. Get in the habit of thanking others for their help, whether you agree with their suggestions or not. A good standard response is, “Thanks, I’ll think that over.” When you are ready to edit, revisit the notes or suggestions and decide which ones you want to incorporate.

No matter how many drafts it takes you to get to crisp, clear writing, don’t judge yourself. You will improve with time and practice. Who cares how many drafts it takes? Just get the job done. You’ll get faster over time and with practice.

Want to learn more about revising? Discover more writing tips from The Writer’s Workout and learn how to:

• Improve your writing skills to make your writing as strong and powerful as possible
• Pitch and sell your work to editors and agents
• Deal with rejection and how to come back better than ever
• Build an author platform and develop an audience
• Balance your creative life with your daily life

Buy The Writer’s Workout now!