Writers’ Tips and Tools

For a change, I’m including a guest post. Thanks, Lucy Adams, for an interesting and thought-provoking article. Why do people read books? What are the reasons that they are among the most important inventions of human civilization? You know the answer, although you may not be aware of it. Today I want to talk about…

I’m afraid she did exactly what I feared. Much to my grief, the good lady editor said my book was unworthy. And she begged me not to take steps toward self-publishing, like finding someone to design a cover for it. ‘It’s far too long. The plot is all over the place. Most of the action happens off stage. It…

Intro  As an author of a mere half of a book, I feel greatly honoured to have been invited by the enterprising Tiffani Burnett-Velez to participate in her Historical Novel Blog Tour, mingling with such illustrious writers as Meara Platt, Douglas Hawkins, A. David Singh, Claudia Long, Greg Michaels, Barbara Eppich Struna, Eleanor Parker Sapia. Thanks for the privilege. Who you are,…

Many aspects form a novel – plot, pace, voice, character arc, setting, backstory, etc. But a novel wouldn’t be anything without characters. And readers want to get to know the main players. Among other things, they want to discover what they look like. And that, in turn, means they want to see their faces. I’m not good…

I’ve come to a point in my story where Silvanus engages in heart-searching exchanges with his wise old mentor, Cerbonius. They don’t do much. They talk. This, I realize, can quickly become boring for the reader, who is hoping for more excitement. What’s the solution? Well: Look how others do it! At the moment, I’m (re-)reading Brian…

I’ve already mentioned how I like to use Google Drive for writing the chapters of my book. I can think of three good reasons why (or four): I can access it from anywhere where I have Internet connectivity It automagically keeps earlier versions of a document It has a built-in dictionary/thesaurus function (see the Research…

Every author stresses how important revision is. The trouble is, one easily overlooks one’s own weak points, omissions and errors. The solution sounds easy: Get a good Critique Partner for reciprocal manuscript correction. But how? There aren’t that many budding English-speaking authors in Oberlunkhofen! I tried several online author sites which offer some facility for…

“Look around where you are right now. Describe this setting – but do so in the words your viewpoint character would use.” This was the exercise I was set in the book I’m currently reading. So I tried, in the words and from the point of view of a 6th century peasant boy from Elba! Here…

Don’t you sometimes make a major change to a chapter – delete a whole section and rearrange the sequence of events – only to have a nagging thought that perhaps that wasn’t such a good idea and in a week or two you’ll want to revert to the old version?  Google Drive knew that was…