On Writing – Page 2 – Liana Brooks

Archive by category "On Writing" (Page 2)

MONDAYS IN PUBLISHING: Responding To Reviews

Reviews are the magical tool by which the Amazon algorithm recognizes your books and the secret formula for attracting new readers… at least that’s the contemporary theory from the marketing masters. The honest truth is that reviews are not meant to be part of the publishing business at all. They…

WRITER CRAFT WEDNESDAY: How To Write Yourself An Editing Letter

Editing Letters… they are often the most beautiful and intimidating part of working with an editor. An editing letter exposes the soul of your book. It looks at all the weak points, highlights the flaws, and flails your ego with all the things that went terribly wrong. A good editing…

WRITER CRAFT WEDNESDAY: The Essential Editing Checklist

Congratulations on having a finished draft of your manuscript. The next step is editing the manuscript to the best of your abilities before you hand it off to a crit partner or editor. This is the essential checklist to get you started. Search for an unpack the following words: Thinks, Knows,…

WRITER CRAFT WEDNESDAY: How Do I Start Editing My Book?

No matter where you are in your editing career you need to know how to edit yourself. For the month of March the Writer Craft Wednesday posts will all be centered on how to edit your own work. Keep in mind that these are guidelines that have worked for me,…

MONDAYS IN PUBLISHING – A Series or Book Bible

I’m writing this post with the hope that I can save some sweet, soon-to-be published author a headache because I didn’t know about this before I published. When I was first published I thought it was my job to write a story and – if a second book came along…

WRITER CRAFT WEDNESDAY – Voice

Voice is how your character (and you as the author) speak throughout a book. It’s part word choice and part personality with a dash of attention. Character Vocabulary + Character Personality + Character’s Interests +Authorial Voice = VOICE Vocabulary – each character has a different vocabulary. How much…

WRITER CRAFT WEDNESDAY – Writer’s Block And How To Manage It

Originally this was written for Savvy Authors in 2013, and then Leslie brought it back November 16th because she was struggling with NaNo. Reading through it, I saw a few places where I could expand on ideas better, so here is the revised edition of Breaking Through Writer’s Block! …

WRITER CRAFT WEDNESDAY – What To Do When You’re Stuck

Let’s practice a little visualization… You sit down in front of your computer today with 6,000 words written and the plan to write Chapter 3. You have your notes and your outlines. This is the perfect time of your writing day, and everything is how you need it to be…

Writer Craft Wednesday – Draft by Draft: How Books Get Written

One of the first lessons a novelist learns is that writing a book is not like writing an essay in school. The dynamics are different. The time factors are different. The end results are different. The drafts are different. With an essay it’s common to finish a full draft of…

How Stories Happen

Anyone who has publicly admitted to writing a book has heard the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” And, because we have a certain reluctance to admitting we pull full manuscripts from a cursed well in the forest under the light of a new moon, authors will often stumble…