Writers’ Tips and Tools
As a fledgling writer of fiction, Vince had a great deal to learn. He profited immensely from attending writers’ workshops in the UK and his home country, Switzerland, with renowned speakers such as Adrian Plass and Joanna Penn. Participating in a local critique group was also most helpful.
Have a look at some of the things he has gleaned in the posts below.
Content Marketing?
I might as well admit it: I’m so out of touch with the world that I didn’t know Content Marketing meant giving away something worth paying for, in order to acquire new customers. I learnt that yesterday in a high-powered webinar held by Copyblogger and Rainmaker. The Content one gives away is, nowadays, usually an e-book…
Discovering who I’m not
As a would-be writer, I, of course, also do a fair amount of reading. One lesson I’ve learned is that a novel is far more enticing to read than any text-book, philosophical monograph, or non-fiction treatise. I read in the bus and train on my way to work. The free daily papers usually win the battle when they’re…
Serious Criticism
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…
Make the Reader Work!
One of my grossest errors when I first started writing fiction was to tell the reader exactly what was going on, why, and what the characters thought about it. How boring is this? Another pastime of mine was to observe snakes. There was something mystical about snakes. Some people thought they represented an evil power, but…
Extremely useful authoring tool
Among many interesting bits and bites, the December 2012 issue of The Woolf plugged the personal writing editor and coach Pro Writing Aid. Perhaps you all know and use it already. ProWritingAid highlights elements like repetitiveness, vague wording, sentence length variation, over-dependence on adverbs, passive voice, over-complicated sentence constructions, and so much more. I tried out the free online version and soon subscribed…
What’s another word for…?
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…