Writing, General
Writing, General

Writing, General

How to Avoid Cliched Phrases

Cliches are sneaky little things. The commonness that makes them cliches also makes them hard to spot; we use them so often in our normal life, we write them without thinking. “It was raining cats and dogs.” “He was bored stiff.” “I’m down in the dumps.” They are all descriptive and everyone will know what you mean, but use them too often and readers will eventually be bored with your prose. I’d rather have someone hate my book than be bored by it. Here’s some simple methods to remove cliches from your writing. 1. Use strong words Cliche phrases are...

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Not F*cking Up Sex Scenes: Making Love Make Sense

If your sex scene isn’t integral to the plot, then you’re not doing it right. Maybe you’ve heard that sex is just supposed to happen every fifty or a hundred pages. Wrong. Even if what you’re writing is erotic romance, the moment needs to be right, and something should happen to move the characters along or the scene will fall flat and feel gratuitous. The most important thing about writing a sex scene is remembering that it is, in fact, a scene like any other in your novel.  That means that all the same rules apply. When writing sex, you...

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Using the Appropriate Amount of Realism in Your Writing

Like everything else in writing, the appropriate amount of realism is going to be very genre dependent. If you’re writing a gritty crime story, you’re going to want a lot of it; a fairy tale romance, maybe not so much. But how do you decide how much realism is right for your story, and how do you go about putting it in (or taking it out)? Let’s start with some examples. The first is from a story I was critiquing that was written by a very good writer. And one of the things this writer does extremely well is write...

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Show Don’t Tell: The Bad Writing Advice That Sounds Good

If you’ve been a writer for more than say, an hour, you’ve already received numerous pieces of advice on how to do it. And while a lot of it may actually be good advice, there is undoubtably a great deal that is bad. Problem is, some of that bad advice may appear to be good. Even worse, some of that bad advice is widely accepted as good. “Show Don’t Tell” is one of those. It is one of the most pervasive pieces of bad advice masquerading as good out there. The problem isn’t that it’s necessarily bad advice, it’s that...

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The Indie Mindset

Let’s talk mindset. Many of you have come out of the Traditional Publishing (TradPub for short) world, either directly, or having been raised and trained to think that way. You see a specific career arc that you need to follow, in order to achieve success. Does this sound familiar? Start in short fiction, honing your craft at 5000-word stories until you think you have the ability to write a pretty good story for one of the periodicals in your genre. Then you start submitting them and to various open anthology calls until you start to achieve some level of success....

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Let’s Talk About AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the current hot button issue in the world of writing. Some people say it’s the greatest thing for writer productivity since the word processor. Others say it will destroy the entire field. As a writer, web designer, and someone who was coding before he hit puberty, I can assure you that it’s not the former and probably won’t do the latter. It’s not even actually artificial intelligence, which is something I am not going to get into in this article, as the semantics of what we call it is less important than what we use it...

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Analyzing Story Beats

Whether it’s on your own stories or someone else’s, learning how to analyze the beats of a story can be an important tool in a writer’s toolbox. First of all, what do I mean by story beats? Story beats are not the plot. In fact, you can map out the beats of a story without talking about the plot at all. Story beats are shifts in tone, in action, in emotion. They are the highs and lows and the movement between those points that make a story enjoyable or tragic or comedic or whatever it is determined to be by...

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From Idea to Book

(Originally appeared as “Taking a Book from Idea to Bestseller” on the WrittenWell front page) There are bits of advice scattered all over the internet on how to write a book, how to market it, how to outline, how to write a great ending. But seeing it as a linear process will help you to do everything in the right order without missing a step—and that is something I don’t see anywhere else.  What I can’t do in this article is explain how to do every step. That would take, well, an entire website. But seeing the steps will help...

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How to Know When Its Done

At some point, after all the writing and revising, your book will be done. Unfortunately, no one knows when that will be. Every author has to figure that out for themselves—and sometimes figure it out anew with each new book. It is more of an art than a science, but I will try to help you with what I know about when to pull the trigger and publish the thing. Most of us know what a first draft looks like. Some are sloppier than others, but most have flaws of some sort in the structure or the prose. Sections might...

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