Category: Writing
How Do You Organize?
I’m looking for a good way to organize all the fiction that I write/have written. Right now I just have a directory and everything gets stored haphazardly in subdirectories there. I guess I could use a plain old spreadsheet, but that isn’t really as extensible as I want. I’ve got one submission tracker that I [...]
Tools of the Trade: Backing up
I’m sure everybody here has lost a hard drive or two. We’ve all experienced major crashes. I have lost all manner of half finished stories over the years. The only real protection you can have against this is to back up your work regularly. My first solution My first backup solution was a little thing [...]
The Process of Writing
I love hearing about process of other writers. Novelr pointed me today to an article on slate about the process Agatha Christie used. It makes me feel better about the many many notebooks, text files, 3×5 cards and other stuff/mess I use.
A Little Inspiration for the Authors Out There
Rhiannon Frater just put up a great post about her journey to getting picked up by Tor. My Journey to Tor – The Story Behind The Deal Congratulations to Rhiannon!
Freeware Outliner for Authors: TextTree 1.3
Merry Christmas, everybody. Several years ago I wrote a little outliner program to make following Randy Ingermanson’s “Snowflake Method” of writing a novel easier. I put it up for sale and have been selling a copy or two here and there ever since. As it ends up, somewhere in the last two computer crashes I’ve [...]
Your Characters Aren’t You
by Randy Ingermanson Note: This article is reprinted with Randy’s permission. At least twice a month, I get a letter that runs roughly like this: "Hi Randy: I’m writing a novel about something horrible that happened in my life. Nobody would ever believe what those dirty rotten scoundrels did to me, so I’m making it [...]
Practical Pointers on Plot Pacing
by Randy Ingermanson Note: this is a follow up from yesterday’s article, and it originally appeared in Randy’s eZine. It is reprinted here with permission. Last month we talked about the theory of pacing. About how when you have a fast-action scene, you spend a lot more words, showing every detail of the action. And [...]
Pacing Your Novel
Note: This article is reprinted with permission. by Randy Ingermanson When I sold my first novel, one of the comments I got back from the editorial team was this: "The pace for this novel was perfect — never too fast nor too slow." I was surprised, because I’d never thought much about pace. Certain things [...]
Hewn out of the Living Rock
OK, so I’m currently reading "King Solomon’s Mines” by H. Rider Haggard. And I came across a passage that describes something that was “Hewn out of the living rock,” and it occurred to me that every single book I have read where any action takes place in a cave or near a cliff has that [...]
Mark Twain’s Rules Governing Literary Art in Domain of Romantic Fiction
Mark Twain wrote these rules in his roast of the novel “Deerslayer” in an essay titled Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences. I didn’t write them. He did. Don’t get mad at me. There’s some good reminders in here for us writers. Rules 1-11 he considered to be the big rules (hence the bigger font), 12-18 are [...]
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