<span class="vcard">Written Well</span>
Written Well

A Guide to Keyboards

The first rule of keyboards is that you like what you like. Some professional writers like the cheapest keyboards they can find, mushy things with keys that feel like lopsided marshmallows. Others (that’s me), love a nice clicky mechanical keyboard. The feedback, the crisp actuation, and the myriad of choices insure that you can get exactly what you like.  So if everyone just likes what they like, why am I writing about it?  Because most people have no idea what their options are, so they don’t even know what they like. You may think you like your keyboard and its...

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Grammar and Critique

Before putting pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard, there are some basic writing fundamentals we have to discuss. I will try to get through them as swiftly as possible, but they can’t be ignored. Grammar is important ​Before you can write, you have to make sure you can write. If you can’t construct a decent sentence, it doesn’t matter how great your story is, it’s going to be hard to get it across. Though you don’t have to follow the rules of grammar—most writers break them with wild abandon—you have to know them. And more importantly, you have to know...

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Point of View and Tense

Point of view (POV) and tense work together in a way to create different levels of story scope and reader engagement, often by sacrificing one for the other. Choosing which to use can be more art than science and you may feel that personal preference and ease of use trumps either of those. However, as you learn more about these two essential properties of writing and how they interact with each other, you’ll see how picking the right ones can help take your writing to the next level. POV One of the most important decisions you make when writing is...

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Erotica Guide

Let's start with what erotica is. Erotica is fiction where the primary focus is on graphic sex and the lead up to it. Where a thriller is about a ticking clock and action, a western is about gunfights, and a romance is about overcoming barriers to forming relationships, the primary goal of characters in erotic writing is to have sex and the climax (lol) is actual sex described in no uncertain terms.

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Storyist

Storyist does everything for an aspiring novelist or screenwriter, and unlike many other one-size-fits-all solutions, it does them all pretty well. Unfortunately, it’s only for Mac users, but if that’s you, it’s worth checking out the free trial to see if Storyist feels like a good fit.  The software includes an iOS version for iPads and iPhones so you can access your files and work on them from anywhere. And when we say that Storyist does everything, we mean everything. Here are just a few of the high points. Full Featured and flexible text editor Outlining software Plot planner with...

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Dynalist.io

Dynalist is free outlining software that lives in the cloud so you can log in from any device to see your outlines and work on them. We love the simplicity and ease of us, coupled with the ability to handle complicated outlines.  Spending a few minutes with the tutorial in Dynalist will teach you how to create simple outlines very quickly, with child and parent items indented appropriately and displayed based on your preferences. You can create as many unique outlines as you like, and customize them in all kinds of ways with checklists, colors, images, and H1, H2, and...

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Horror Guide

No matter the subgenre, all horror shares an overarching theme: fear. Whether it’s splatterpunk, serial killer, supernatural, or anything else, every book in this genre is a spine-tingler. You can never go wrong in ramping up the fear factor, and the good guys don’t always have to win. And where there’s not fear, there’s tension. Every horror reader wants tension. They want to be concerned for the safety — and often sanity — of the characters. You need to make those characters relatable and then put them on a path to destruction. Like every thriller has a ticking clock, every...

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Grimdark Guide

Grimdark is the unwanted bastard of high fantasy. The battles are graphic and gory, the politics dirty, the protagonists venal, corrupt, selfish, and flawed—and those are the good guys! But there's something refreshing about everyone in the book acting like humans in all their cheating, lying, duplicitous glory.

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