I found this post on the blog The Other Side of the Story. Being in the middle of doing a scene-by-scene plot of my next novel, this couldn't have been written at a more opportune time. Whether you're a plotter or a pantser, this advise will help you streamline the plot tremendously.
The Other Side of the Story: The Best Advice on Plotting I've Ever Heard: Two T...: But wait, there's more! I read a few pieces of plotting advice in the last few weeks I wish I'd written. They're nothing new, nothing gro...
Monday, May 21, 2012
Friday, May 4, 2012
Tips to Self-Edit a Novel
For most of us, writing a novel is easy. You have the story and it’s only a matter of pounding away at the keyboard until the story magically enfolds on the pages. Right?
Wrong!
Getting the story onto the computer with a word processing program is the easy part. In previous posts I discussed the YWriter5 program, which is still free and I stand by my recommendation for first-time authors to attempt to use this program to plan their novel. The program has been updated and currently it is truly editing-friendly as well.
It allows you to break down your novel in a series of scenes and chapters, which you can export to MS Word or other program for editing. After you’re finished editing the selected chapter, you simply import the chapter back into YWriter5 and viola, everything is together again.
But, a program alone will not help you edit your work to such a fashion that you can submit to a publisher. You’ll need to work really hard before any publisher would look at your work. If you’re anything like me, editing your novel could take longer than writing the damn thing. I searched the internet for tips and advise on how to hone those sorely lacking skills in self-editing and there is a myriad of information available.
I listed only the ones I found most useful.
Tips on How to Self-Edit Your Novel
The Fiction Doctor – Cindy Davis
She lists a total of ten tips on how to improve your writing with fairly detailed examples of how to fix the problem in your writing. They are:-
1. Show don’t tell – our old favourite and one that causes the most headaches to all writers. What does it mean? How do you know when to tell and when to show? Is show always better? I found the explanation given on the website quite helpful as it contains examples of what she means.
2. Avoid Overuse of Pronouns – this speaks for itself, but check out Cindy’s example if you’re unsure.
3. Don’t Intrude as Author - I think most of us are guilty of this at some point. It goes without saying that authors shouldn’t underestimate the reader’s intelligence. If you are in the character’s head, don’t tell your reader this over and over again.
4. Less is more – don’t explain everything to death. If it doesn’t really matter where the book case is in room, don’t explain this.
5. Don’t over-describe your character – it speaks for itself. Give just enough information that the reader can form a mental picture of your character. As Cindy’s explains, these descriptions are static and slows down the narrative.
6. Limit the amount of background you give on a character – rather drivel it through the novel in small pieces.
7. Keep your point of view steady – nothing frustrates a reader more than to try figure out from whose perspective the story is told. While head-hopping can make for interesting reading, if done badly, it can alienate the reader pretty quick.
8. Use the best word to describe the action – walking carefully could be substituted with tiptoed, being nervous could be substituted with fidgeting, biting the lip, etc.
9. Avoid using passive voice – we all heard this before. It slows the action and is one of the pet peeves of editors at publishing houses. Take a look at Cindy’s examples, they’re quite insightful if you have problems with this.
10. Make sure the dialogue in your novel sounds like your characters and not yourself- this is a mayor point in writing realistic dialogue. Keep the dialogue true to the character you portray otherwise it might come across as stifled and forced.
Other points I found helpful when editing is to check for repetitive words. I use MS Word’s find function to highlight pronouns – you’d be amazed at how many you can eliminate in this way. You can also upload a section of your work to the Autocrit – program where it will give you the word-usage. YWriter5 has a function where it will tell you the word usage in a scene. The problem with seeing it only in one scene is that using the word once in a scene seems fine, until you remember that you have fifty or a hundred scenes all using the same word.
Watch out for problem words. These words are usually words you can delete without making a difference to the sentence. Words like down, around, away, back, almost, already, nearly, really, actually, quite, wanted to, started to, began to, tried to.
Another wonderful resource for writers is Bob Mayer’s 70 Solutions to Common Writing Mistakes. You can obtain a copy of this by subscribing to the Writer’s Digest Newsletter. You could also do worse than check out their archive of articles on writing. In particular the articles pertaining to revision.
If you are stuck, the internet provides loads of useful information on writing and revising. Advise on actual editing your novel, however, seems a little harder to find. So, please share if you find a useful resource for self-editing your novel.
Wrong!
Getting the story onto the computer with a word processing program is the easy part. In previous posts I discussed the YWriter5 program, which is still free and I stand by my recommendation for first-time authors to attempt to use this program to plan their novel. The program has been updated and currently it is truly editing-friendly as well.
It allows you to break down your novel in a series of scenes and chapters, which you can export to MS Word or other program for editing. After you’re finished editing the selected chapter, you simply import the chapter back into YWriter5 and viola, everything is together again.
But, a program alone will not help you edit your work to such a fashion that you can submit to a publisher. You’ll need to work really hard before any publisher would look at your work. If you’re anything like me, editing your novel could take longer than writing the damn thing. I searched the internet for tips and advise on how to hone those sorely lacking skills in self-editing and there is a myriad of information available.
I listed only the ones I found most useful.
Tips on How to Self-Edit Your Novel
The Fiction Doctor – Cindy Davis
She lists a total of ten tips on how to improve your writing with fairly detailed examples of how to fix the problem in your writing. They are:-
1. Show don’t tell – our old favourite and one that causes the most headaches to all writers. What does it mean? How do you know when to tell and when to show? Is show always better? I found the explanation given on the website quite helpful as it contains examples of what she means.
2. Avoid Overuse of Pronouns – this speaks for itself, but check out Cindy’s example if you’re unsure.
3. Don’t Intrude as Author - I think most of us are guilty of this at some point. It goes without saying that authors shouldn’t underestimate the reader’s intelligence. If you are in the character’s head, don’t tell your reader this over and over again.
4. Less is more – don’t explain everything to death. If it doesn’t really matter where the book case is in room, don’t explain this.
5. Don’t over-describe your character – it speaks for itself. Give just enough information that the reader can form a mental picture of your character. As Cindy’s explains, these descriptions are static and slows down the narrative.
6. Limit the amount of background you give on a character – rather drivel it through the novel in small pieces.
7. Keep your point of view steady – nothing frustrates a reader more than to try figure out from whose perspective the story is told. While head-hopping can make for interesting reading, if done badly, it can alienate the reader pretty quick.
8. Use the best word to describe the action – walking carefully could be substituted with tiptoed, being nervous could be substituted with fidgeting, biting the lip, etc.
9. Avoid using passive voice – we all heard this before. It slows the action and is one of the pet peeves of editors at publishing houses. Take a look at Cindy’s examples, they’re quite insightful if you have problems with this.
10. Make sure the dialogue in your novel sounds like your characters and not yourself- this is a mayor point in writing realistic dialogue. Keep the dialogue true to the character you portray otherwise it might come across as stifled and forced.
Other points I found helpful when editing is to check for repetitive words. I use MS Word’s find function to highlight pronouns – you’d be amazed at how many you can eliminate in this way. You can also upload a section of your work to the Autocrit – program where it will give you the word-usage. YWriter5 has a function where it will tell you the word usage in a scene. The problem with seeing it only in one scene is that using the word once in a scene seems fine, until you remember that you have fifty or a hundred scenes all using the same word.
Watch out for problem words. These words are usually words you can delete without making a difference to the sentence. Words like down, around, away, back, almost, already, nearly, really, actually, quite, wanted to, started to, began to, tried to.
Another wonderful resource for writers is Bob Mayer’s 70 Solutions to Common Writing Mistakes. You can obtain a copy of this by subscribing to the Writer’s Digest Newsletter. You could also do worse than check out their archive of articles on writing. In particular the articles pertaining to revision.
If you are stuck, the internet provides loads of useful information on writing and revising. Advise on actual editing your novel, however, seems a little harder to find. So, please share if you find a useful resource for self-editing your novel.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Blogs and Books on the Craft of Writing
Every so often I stumble upon a blog with valuable information on writing and I realize that I have not even reached the tip of the iceberg in honing my writing craft. If you read every single blog and book about writing as a profession, you will have no time left to write the novel or non-fiction book. This is why finding a blog or blogs that keeps you on track without stealing your precious writing time, is important.
Many people spend hours a day surfing the internet, trying to gather as much information as possible on how to write, what is acceptable, how to hook a publisher or agent to invest in their books, that they end up with little or no time to do the actual writing. Don’t get me wrong, you need to know all this stuff, but without the finished novel, polished to as close to perfection as you can get it, the information is useless. You need a book to sell in order to sell your product. You need a completed manuscript to compare to the books doling out advise on how to write before you know if you’ve made the mistakes.
In a society where time is a precious commodity, I found a couple of blogs and books that will help you manage your time better while still keeping up to date on the business of writing a book. This is personal preferences to me and what I felt was helpful without spending all my time in the learning mode.
As for blogs:
Kristen Lamb’s Warrior Writers must be my absolute favourite. Her posts are well researched, informative and written in an easy to read voice. Her eight part series on the structure of a novel is particularly informative and any writer would do well to read them.
Another blog I found particularly helpful is Writers Digest. This website posts hundreds of helpful articles and tips not just about writing, but about the whole writing industry. It is one of the sites every writer should visit regularly.
As for books:
Story Structure Architect by Victoria Lynn Schmidt is a good starting point. I found the book a little tedious to read(especially if you’ve just read a blog post from Kristin Lamb), but the information is invaluable. It sets out the different structures required for different genres as well as a little bit on handling conflict in the novel.
How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N Frey and his subsequent books on writing remains my all time favourites. This author has the ability to set out the steps to writing excellent fiction in a no-nonsense voice and in terms that the layman (that’s me) can understand. Besides a good dictionary, these books are a must in my opinion.
As I’ve stated above, writers don’t have hours a day to learn the craft – we need it to write. These books and blogs made my life a lot simpler
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Self Publishing on Smashwords.com,and Amazon.com
 |
| Available from Amazon.com |
The novel is in Afrikaans so I didn’t expect a lot of sales from the onset. The Afrikaans market is very limited to say the least and although many South Africans are living abroad, it is a minute amount of people interested in reading Afrikaans compared to the rest of the English-speaking world.
First of all, it is scary to say the least, to let your baby loose on the world without the backing of a formal publisher that does the marketing and editing for you. I suck at marketing. So, I published on Smashwords.com first.
Self-Publishing with Smashwords.com
Smashwords.com makes it laughably easy to publish your work on their web site. They provide you with a style guide that, if followed to the letter, helps you format your work for acceptance into their premium catalogue. This means your book is automatically distributed to booksellers like Barnes and Noble, Sony, Diesel, Apple and Kobo.
The other advantage of using the style guide is that your book is 99% formatted already for publishing at Amazon.com’s Kindle Direct Publishing. You get to upload a cover for your book and if you are not up to creating your own, Smashwords.com even provides links to people that can assist – for a fee naturally.
Publishing is the easy part, just as writing is the easy part of a book, but marketing your book and getting it out to the general public is quite another thing. If you are mostly a hermit like me (according to my children), engaging in social media is very difficult. Using it to promote yourself, is quite impossible. Besides a few friends and family, I find it difficult to self-promote and tell everyone: “Hey, check out my book. I think you’ll like it!” That is just impossible for me to do. I hate salesmen and I detest sales pitches even more. So how on earth do you do it?
The honest answer is that I don’t have a clue. It’s not that I don’t believe in my book – I do, but I’m a writer, not a salesman.
Well I digress, publishing at Smashwords.com has the advantage that your book is published in a multitude of formats. Not everyone has a e-reader and not everyone can afford to sit for hours in front of a computer reading fiction. Smashwords makes it easy in the sense that you can download a PDF file and print it if that is what you want.
Another thing I like about Smashwords.com is that your book is not DRM locked. Nothing is worse than wanting to buy a book in a format you reader doesn’t support and then finding that it is DRM locked and you can’t convert it. While I understand the reasoning behind the locking of the books, I don’t support it – I trust my readers to use and not abuse the literature I spent months (sometimes years) to create.
With all these plus points, it is thus with a sad heart that I have to confess I haven’t yet sold one book on Smashwords.com.
Self-Publishing with Amazon.com via Kindle Direct Publishing
Just after I published at Smashwords.com I read on a forum that one should consider publishing through Amazon.com as well. I was a bit intimidated, being from South Africa at how the payment structure would work. At Smashwords.com you get paid via Pay Pal, which suited me fine. At Amazon.com, if you are from another country, you get paid via paper check – and only once you reach the minimum pay out level of $100. I didn’t really anticipate any sales so the pay out problem would be well and truly in the future and I decided to go for it.
Publishing with Amazon.com (KDP) was a breeze. I had already done everything required for publishing on Smashwords, so the process was painless. Then I sat back and waited. It takes a couple of days for your work to be indexed at Amazon.com and after it went live, I was like a junky. I checked a couple of times a day if there were any sales.
Wow, to my amazement, the fist day I had sold 2 books. To say I was excited doesn’t even begin to cover the feeling I had. A stranger had bought my book without any solicitation from me. Then I started chewing my nails. Would it be good enough? What if they don’t like it? What if . . . I had to laugh at this point.
How many books have I read that I didn’t like? Quite a few, but I never held it against the author. I just didn’t buy any more books written by him/her. And then I worried some more. Point being, in three weeks I managed to sell 14 books on Amazon.com and none on Smashwords.com. I think Amazon.com is just more visible than Smashwords and gets more traffic.
So bottom line- publish on both platforms to give your book a fair chance to be discovered and utilize all the writing tools you can to get your work read.
Above all, always keep writing.
del.icio.us Tags: self-publishing,Smashwords.com,Amazon.com,Kindle Direct Publishing,marketing your book
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Tips to Improve your Writing
Every writer needs tips on how to improve their writing. Whether you are just stuck at a certain point or need general ideas on how to edit you writing, we all need help sometime.
I found an excellent article today on how to improve your writing. Several different authors contributed to the article, which, in my opinion, only makes it better.
In essence, the article provides twenty-five helpful hints on how to improve your writing, including tips on what to do when you are stuck and the scene refuses to flow, where to find inspiration for your writing and several self-editing tips. The problems the writers state in the article are not new, but some of the solutions are quite engaging. Imagine talking to your piece of writing when you get stuck. Would you have thought of that? I never considered the possibility for fear someone might overhear and think I finally lost all my marbles. At least now I have an excuse by saying I read in an article that it might improve my writing.
So although some of the 30 minute solutions sound a little (maybe more than a little?) crazy, I can whole-heartedly recommend the article 25 Ways to Improve your Writing in 30 Minutes a Day. You never know, someday you might be stuck and one of these solutions might just work.
Please read the article and tell me what you think. Do you think us beginner writers need more articles along these lines? Do you think that experienced writers could also benefit from the article?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)