How To Write – Page 2

Archive by category "How To Write" (Page 2)

Finding Your Strengths

All writers are not created equal. Some are gifted at world building, others excel at pacing, some write witty dialog without breaking a sweat (looking at you, Whedon). Whatever your skill, you should identify it and make the most of it? Why? Let’s pretend that your greatest strength is dialog….

How To Be A Good Critique Partner (reprint)

Critique groups abound, especially as NaNoWriMo wraps up. The crisp, cold weather of winter combined with the frenzy of writing a novel in a month spawns writing groups like there is no tomorrow. New writing groups are wonderful, but not all critique partners are created equal. The horror stories about…

Mother of Teens: How To Write With Little Kids At Home

On one of the writing forums I belong to someone asked how anyone could possibly write with little kids around. What they really wanted to know was: CAN YOU WRITE WITHOUT PUTTING YOUR KIDS IN DAYCARE? Not everyone has a partner, nearby family, or the money needed to create a…

Writing Realistic Romantic Relationships

There are a couple of hard and fast rules for writing romance genre that you need to keep in mind if you want to write category Romance. Anything market as Romance must have a Happily Ever After/Happy For Now ending. Anything less than that, and you will eaten alive by…

Stages of Love: Commitment and Happily Ever After

Welcome to the beautiful, danger fraught world of Commitment. The Basics Commitment is a place few authors dare to tread. Committed couples? Where’s the romance in that? (Confession: I totally think you can write a great romance with married characters and this is why EVEN VILLAINS FALL IN LOVE…

Stages of Love – Attraction

Yesterday we talked about the science behind Lust. The mad, crazy, passionate time when you are truly obsessed with another sentient being, or at least obsessed with getting in their pants and scoring a DNA exchange. After a short period of time the original chemical lust wears off. Reality sets…

Stages of Love – Lust and Rough-Hewn Spears

Love is a many-facted thing. We pine for it. We write about it. We dream of it. We mourn the loss and yet somehow always seem to wind up with our hearts broken again… Love is rough. And as much as people claim to know about love we often forget…

The Ultimate NaNo Prep Post (good for the rest of the year too)

This is the master post for everything I recommend to get you prepped for NaNoWriMo or a Fast Draft. Remember, each author is unique and so is each book, so be sure to play with this and make it work for you. The way I think and the steps I…

Plotting Beat Sheet

Plotting Session 1: Structure Plotting Session 2: Beat Sheets Plotting Session 3: The Epic Plotting Video During the epic plotting video where Amy Laurens and I fixed her Very Broken Novel™ I showed you the beat sheet I made Amy fill out before we replotted her book. This isn’t a…

The Gift of Failure

Originally published on Savvy Authors in 2015. Back when I had just started writing with the intent to publish, around 2006, I printed out a copy of my very first novel and shared it with a friend who had a good taste for books. She was the kind of friend…