SPIN ME A WEB by author Sally J. Walker

 

Instinct dictates to a spider how a web must be constructed. Hm, if it were only that easy to spin the plot of a novel! 
 

In January, I will take participants on the journey of learning the signposts that anchor a plot’s web and the principles that link the novel’s words into a fascinating pattern for BOTH writer and reader. 

 

I discovered over 20 years ago that the stories I most thoroughly enjoyed had a point and charged forward toward that destination in patterns I could identify with and understand. I learned to recognize the “seat-of-the-pants” writers who took me on unnecessary side-trips or who meandered in their stories. 

Study and careful analysis resulted in an indelicate sledgehammer to my forehead: Some writers didn’t plan their story events but simply let them unfold whenever they sat down to write. The problem was I did not read as slowly as they wrote. I am a speed-reader therefore any digressions or meandering annoyed me to the “nth” degree. 

Of course, not a writer on this planet is going to spew a novel as fast as a reader can consume it, let alone a speed-reader. Understanding that as a writer, I did not want to waste my time or my reader’s imaginary energy on digressions and meanderings, thus I evolved the practice of planning the plots of my novels and screenplays via signpost events.

My creativity was not hampered by the structure. In fact, every time I sit down to a story I feel the thrill of creative energy driving toward the next signpost in my characters’ lives. Life may be illogical, messy, chaotic, but I can come and go in my character’s lives because I KNOW where they are headed. I know I will not waste their time (and the reader’s) with irrelevancies. I have control of this my imaginings.

Planning allows the writer to envision the world the characters live in at the beginning of the story. Of course, some genres—such as science fiction and fantasy--demand such awareness to depict a credible milieu the characters are living in from the first word. So, that’s a given.

My concept of planning deals with the “Big Picture” of the entire plot. That is not instinctual patterning like a spider demonstrates. Nope, it is a learned skill, the practice of connecting one event to its consequences in as enthralling and challenging a manner as possible. It is intentional progression, not seat-of-the-pants guessing that can frequently lead a writer to dead-ends and the dreaded “I don’t know what happens next.”

The key words here are “logical causality” sprinkled with the magic spice of “What if” lists. Plotting Fiction can be as easy as identifying the timing and placement of the signpost events and wording the pattern of the web the characters must tread to arrive at their ultimate destination.

So, come on, Writer, and let’s learn the skills of spinning a web that captures a reader!
 

Sally J. Walker, Website: www.sallyjwalker.com

Sally Walker’s published credits include literary, romance and western novels, a nonfiction essay collection, several creative writing textbooks, stage plays, poetry, and many magazine articles on the craft of writing, including staff contributions to two international film magazines. She has a YA series and several children's books waiting in the wings. With 28 screenplays written and one sold, Sally has a WGA-signatory agent representing her. In addition to long time active memberships in such national writing organizations as RWA, WWA and SCBWI, she was President of the prestigious Nebraska Writers Guild 2007-2011.She still has time to work as a small press Editorial Director for The Fiction Works, in charge of acquisitions and supervising sub-contracted editors. Sally has taught writing seminars, both on-site and on-line, for over 25 years and is the facilitator for the weekly meetings of the Nebraska Writers Workshop in Ralston, NE.

I hope you will join my class on

PLOTTING FICTION

Hosted by

Fantasy-Futuristic & Paranormal Romance Writers

This 4 WEEK class starts January 14, 2013

For more information click HERE

 

 

More Effective Proofreading by Ally Broadfield

Once you finish writing a manuscript, what do you do? Edit until it shines, of course, but before you submit it to an agent or editor or self-publish it, don’t forget the final step: Proofreading. 

Consider the following paragraph: 

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. 

While this likely did not originate at Cambridge University and doesn’t hold true in all circumstances, it does illustrate the point that it’s easy to skim over spelling and typographical errors without noticing them, especially when you’re reading words you’ve painstakingly written and edited countless times. 

Whether you’re polishing your manuscript for a contest, preparing to submit to an agent or editor, or planning to self-publish, knowing how to effectively proofread your work is an essential skill. Remember — you never get a second chance to make a first impression. 

Many people think proofreading and editing are the same thing, but in reality, they are very different. Think of editing as a cake, and proofreading as the icing on the cake. You spend a lot of time making that cake, greasing and flouring the pan, painstakingly measuring and mixing the ingredients, baking it for just the right amount of time, carefully removing it from the pan and cooling it on a wire rack. You’ve created a fabulous cake, but who’s going to want to eat it if you don’t put icing on the cake? Proofreading is the icing on the cake, the final stage of the editing process. It is limited to mechanical correctness and focuses on grammar, spelling, punctuation, typos, and syntax. 

Before you proofread, edit. You can’t frost the cake before it’s baked, can you? Your manuscript should be fully edited prior to proofreading. You’re probably thinking that by the time you finish editing, you will have caught all the proofreading errors. You probably did catch a few typos, but because you weren’t proofreading, you didn’t catch everything. Why? Because proofreading and editing require two different conceptual processes. Editing involves analyzing and reorganizing information into effectively expressed ideas. Proofreading requires separating the components of language from any meaning so the brain doesn’t allow you to see what you want to see rather than what is actually there on the page.  

Tips for More Effective Proofreading 

1.      Practice

Have you ever been in the middle of reading a blog or online news article when you notice a typo, a missing apostrophe, a sentence you would have written differently? Practicing your proofreading skills on other people’s work is a great way to improve your skills. It’s a fun, active way to become more conscious of the process. 

2.      Get Some Distance

If you have the time, let your finished work sit for a while. In his book On Writing, author Stephen King recommends a minimum of two to three weeks. Looking at it from a fresh perspective will make a huge difference in your ability to catch errors. 

3.      Get a Different Perspective

Printing out your work will often help you get the different perspective you need to catch errors, but if you’re working on a long manuscript, it’s a tremendous waste of resources. Oftentimes changing the font style, size, and/or color will help you get a different perspective. Also try reading it on your ereader, netbook, phone, or other device that will make it look different than it did on your computer.  Anything that changes the way it looks will help you see it from a new perspective.  

4.      Read It Out Loud

If I could only share one tip with you, this would be the one. Reading your work out loud forces you to focus on what’s actually written on the page instead of skimming over it like you do when you read in your head. It will help you detect errors in punctuation, syntax, rhythm, flow, and a myriad of other issues. Hearing your work read out loud without having the written words in front of you can also be helpful. Record yourself reading aloud, or try using the read aloud function on your computer or ereader.  

5.      Know What You Don’t Know

Look at proofreading as a learning experience. When you proofread, you’re not just looking for errors you recognize. You also need to learn to identify errors you didn’t know you were making. If something looks or sounds wrong, look it up. If you’re not sure about something, look it up.  

The tips in this article come from a lesson in my workshop, Tips and Techniques for More Effective Proofreading.

 

Ally Broadfield is a grammar geek and freelance proofreader. She writes young adult/middle grade fantasy and historical romance set in Regency England and Imperial Russia. You can find her here:  

WEBSITE   FACEBOOK  TWITTER  

 

I hope you will join my class on

Tips and Techniques for More Effective Proofreading

Hosted by

Fantasy-Futuristic & Paranormal Romance Writers

This 4 WEEK class starts January 14, 2013

For more information click HERE

Finding Your Audience by Suzanne Rock

Marketing your book can be an overwhelming task. There are so many options out there, some that cost money, others that cost time, and many that cost both. How do you know which one to choose? Well, before you do any book marketing campaign, you need to establish clear goals. What is it that you hope to achieve?

For most of us, the answer is easy: we want to sell books. Lots of books. Heck, we want to sell so many books that we retire from our day jobs and buy a sailboat and take off into the sunset. Am I right? (If I am, shout AMEN!)

It's important to get out of that small-world view, however. If you are in this for the long haul, then you want to write more than one book, which means that you want to sell more than one book, and that leads to building a fan base.

Instead of trying to push a particular book, it's more resource efficient to push your author brand. An author brand is a theme or slogan that goes across all of your writing. It's what people think of when they see your name.

Many writers think that this is genre specific (she writes dark paranormal romance), but this is not necessarily true. It can be a style of writing, or a theme. (She writes humorous, feel-good romances. He writes how one person's actions has a ripple affect in a community.). Before you begin any marketing campaign, it's critical to establish an author brand.

Once you have a brand, it's important to build an author platform that will promote your brand to readers. While your brand is your slogan, a platform is the tools you use to announce your slogan to the world. I'll be talking about the different things an author can use to build a platform over the next few months.

Promoting your author brand as a whole is much more effective than promoting an individual book. The hard truth is that it is tough to measure whether any promotion has worked or not based on book sales. Many won't buy your book, but your name will be cemented, or "sticky," in a reader's mind, and may cause them to buy your book over another one at a different point in time. For example, the next time the potential buyer wants to read a good cozy mystery, they'll think of you. When they browse Amazon looking for something to read, they'll recognize your name and read the blurb.

Things like this are difficult to measure. Take heart, however. The more you get your brand out there, the "stickier" it becomes in people's minds. Promoting an author brand is a compounding effort, meaning marketing that you do for your first book will help sell the second, third and forth. Marketing for your fourth book will help push your backlist, and so on.

Promoting a brand is more about promoting you as a person, rather than a story. People are online to make personal connections, not to hear a sales pitch. Forming these relationships is the first step to gaining a fan base who will not only buy your first book, but keep coming back for more.

For example, take my author brand. People know that I write dark, erotic romance. If they want a light-hearted chick-lit book, they know they won't find it there. If they want an emotional, fast-paced, sexy read, then they'll check out my books.

Who are your favorite authors? Do they have a brand? Are you an author with a brand? What is it? I want to hear about it!

~~~

Award winning and bestselling author Suzanne Rock resides in central Massachusetts with her college sweetheart and two daughters. She started writing paranormal erotic romance in 2009 and sold her first story, Spyder’s Web, to Loose Id in June of that year. She has recently added erotic contemporary stories to her list of works. In addition to writing, she teaches courses on craft and the publishing industry through Romance Writers of America and Savvy Authors. She’s also is the social media coordinator for Pink Petal Books.

Website: www.SuzanneRock.com
Blog: Romance on a Budget: www.suzannerock.wordpress.com
Facebook: www.Facebook.com/SuzanneRockAuthor
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Suzanne_Rock
Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/Suzanne_Rock

Class:

Ebook and Digital Publishing: Is it for me?

Digital books are becoming more and more popular. Devices such as the Kindle, iPAD and Nook have brought ebooks into the limelight and provided many new and exciting publishing opportunities for writers. Despite this, many are still confused about the epublishing process. This course is for beginners who want to learn more about digital publishing and determine if it’s a good fit for them. We will touch on big vs. small epress, self-publishing, vanity publishing, contracts, promotions and dealing with epirates. By the end of class, the student should have a good understanding of the options available and have the tools they need if they wish to move toward digital publication.

Here's the link for more info on the workshop:  http://my.rwa.org/p/cm/ld/fid=377

BUTTONOMICS by Pat Hauldren

Are you a healthy writer?

Most of us don’t put “healthy” and “writing” into the same sentence, much less in the same universe. If you’re like me (and Gawd help you, you are not), the better you get at writing, the better you get at sitting. And the better we get at sitting, the better we get at eating, and the better we get at eating, … well, you can imagine the rest.

I am not a particularly healthy writer. (OK, you might say, then why is this woman bothering me about it?) However, I am a writer who wants to become healthier. And, that might describe you, too. (And even if it doesn’t, why not read a bit further and see how easy it just might be?)

Writing is a sedentary career, for the most part, with hours in front of a computer screen. Some of us can dictate while we walk or exercise, typing it in later, some few and quite fortunate of us have a secretary or assistant (and I want to meet you if you do!), but the rest of us end up in front of our computer, pounding away at the keyboard… sitting….on our bottom.

So how can we make writing and our chosen calling a healthier profession? There in one way to begin:

Buttonomics

Well, what would you call it? We are all anatomically similar (most of us are human), and most of us probably don’t type standing, however, a few writers are quite well known for writing while standing.

“The sedentary life (das sitzfleisch—literally “sitting meat”) is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value,” said Nietzsche about Flaubert’s innocuous statement that “one cannot think and write except when seated.”

According to the author of Madame Bovary (1856), Flaubert previously informed Guy de Maupassant, “a civilized person needs much less locomotion than the doctors claim.”

We are all civilized persons here, and to write our best, we also do not need as much “locomotion” as our doctors would have us do. Yet, to be a healthy writer, we actually do.

This is where “buttonomics” comes in. You have two choices:

1.       Avoid bottonomics by standing while writing

2.       Practice buttonomics while writing

3.       Don’t write

Some of you more fashionista-types might know all about cellulite and liposuction and silicon injections and even butt-padding. Others of us go “ew.” Either way, you can help avoid all that by practicing buttonomics.

While sitting in your favorite writing chair, squeeze your buttocks together for several minutes at a time, either constantly squeeze or squeeze off-and-on. If you are especially sedentary (like me), you might like to start slow, say five squeezes, rest five minutes, then five times more, or rest 5 pages, whatever works for you. In a few weeks buttonomics will be habit and your bottom will be healthier while earning it’s dollar with your writing.

Or maybe you’d prefer to stand?

Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll, and Fernando Pessoa all wrote standing, while Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, and Truman Capote took the Flaubertian creed to its ultimate extent by writing lying down. Capote went so far as to declare himself “a completely horizontal writer.”

It was the early twentieth century labor journalist and suffragette, Mary Heaton Vorse, who pithily described the art of writing as “the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

However, Earnest Hemingway declared, “writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up,” which he did by perching his typewriter on a chest-high shelf, while his desk became obscured by books.

Thomas Wolfe, at six-foot-six inches tall, wrote his novels using the top of the refrigerator as his desk. Of course, refrigerators were a bit smaller in his time than today, but at his height, it wasn’t a problem.

Roald Dahl, the author of such books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, also six-foot-six, climbed into a sleeping bag before settling into an old wing-backed chair, his feet resting immobile on a battered traveling case full of logs to write. Dahl claimed that “all the best stuff comes at the desk.”

Another stander, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—the Supreme Court justice who coined the phrase “clear and present danger” to limit the First Amendment when its practice endangered the state—wrote his concise legal opinions while standing at a lectern because “nothing conduces to brevity like a caving in of the knees.”

And not to be outdone, the former secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, when handed a list of approved torture techniques being used at Guantanamo Bay, infamously scribbled a query on it: “I stand for 8-10 hours. Why is standing [of prisoners] limited to four hours?”

Indeed, if they can do it, can we? Probably not, or at least, not often.

But there are ways to help counteract the settling of our body into an unhealthy blob of humanity while we are writing and sitting, and many of these methods we’ll discuss in my upcoming class: Me & Chi: Increase your creativity and health with Tai Chi and mediation for writers scheduled here in July.

Pat Hauldren writes speculative fiction in Grand Prairie, Texas, and has just returned from a conference with 4 out of 4 agent requests on her current urban fantasy. She’s training to become a tai chi instructor and has taken tai chi training around the world. She enjoys chanting and meditation as well. Pat also writes 5 gigs for Examiner.com and writes and edits freelance. Learn more about Pat Hauldren at www.pathauldren.com

I hope you will join my class

ME & CHI:

Increase Your Creativity and Health

with QiGong and Meditation

Hosted by

Fantasy-Futuristic & Paranormal

Romance Writers

This 7 Day class starts July 16^th

For more information click HERE

 

Ernest Hemingway preferred to write standing up.

What the Heck is Deep Point of View? by Carrie Lofty

So often when receiving critiques from peers, editors or agents, the subject of “deep point of view” can rear its head. What, exactly, does that entail? How can we add depth to characters--and therefore depth to our stories--by immersing readers into unique, powerful points of view?

My upcoming course for FF&P is title “Beyond Research: Stronger Point of View and the Effective Use of Detail.” I initially approached the topic from the perspective of a historical romance writer--hence the workshop title "Beyond Research." Originally, I wanted to convey to workshop attendees that research was not the be-all end-all. It's not about how many obscure details you can cram into a book, but how meaningfully those details create individual characters who resonate with the reader.

I accidentally stumbled on this idea for myself while teaching an introductory creative writing class for senior citizens. We were in a spare, industrial room, where florescent lights glared down on long gray desks--a wholly uninspiring space. But as I looked out across the room, I noticed that all of the chairs were brightly colored plastic. My daughters, then age three and four, would've loved that room. They would've run along the four tiered levels, probably skipping back and forward along each one, and most certainly counting the number of blue, red, yellows, and green chairs. They would've used the chalkboard to keep track of each color.

To write a description of that room from a non-parents' perspective might have been a dull affair, but to describe it from my POV would've demonstrated a mother's affection for her blossoming children. To write it from a child's POV would've been to create a place nearly as much fun as a playground. Perspectives make the scenes, the characters, and the story as a whole.

Grounding any information--from historical details to paranormal world-building--within POV not only provides the reader with a sense of location, but helps her connect to the characters. Details that do not contribute to this goal are expendable. 

With that in mind, consider the following passages. One is from my June 26 release from Pocket Books, STARLIGHT, and the other was taken from Wikipedia. Both describe the Northern Lights.

Being able to name each star held nothing to way he saw the aurora anew. Through her eyes. He had wanted to show her a natural marvel. Instead, she had given him a gift. He saw color like a field of flowers and movement like a dancing angel. Science fell away to reveal only beauty. Now, this moment with Polly wove into each of his veins and promised to remain just as bright.

Auroras seen near the magnetic pole may be high overhead, but from farther away, they illuminate the northern horizon as a greenish glow or sometimes a faint red, as if the Sun were rising from an unusual direction. Discrete aurorae often display magnetic field lines or curtain-like structures, and can change within seconds or glow unchanging for hours, most often in fluorescent green.

The second, factual description is pure research, but readers would be disappointed if that was the full extent of how information was relayed to them in fiction. The description as seen from Alex Christie’s point of view is more personal. He’s a scientist who’s suddenly looking at a familiar sight in very new ways.

That is deep point of view. Take research. Make it personal. Use it to enrich characters and further the plot or romance.

I hope you’ll come along with me as we further explore the concept of deep point of view, and how little tricks and details will enrich your writing. Once you start to see through the eyes of your characters, you’ll never see research or your writing the same way again.

Next up for Carrie:

STARLIGHT, the second full-length romance in the Christies series, is set in Victorian Glasgow. It just received a 4½ stars Top Pick from RT Book Reviews. Then comes Pocket Star digital original, HIS VERY OWN GIRL, an honest to goodness historical romance set in WWII! Available September 4.

Carrie on the internet

Twitter: @carrielofty

FACEBOOK   

I hope you will join my class

Beyond Research: Stronger POV

& Effective Use of Detail

Hosted by

Fantasy-Futuristic & Paranormal

Romance Writers

This 2 week class starts July 2^nd

For more information click HERE.