Category: Novel Writing

#NaNoWriMo: Day 2—How to De-Angst Novel #Writing

Even if you despise outlining, give it a shot. A few hours of outlining with save days of beating your head on your laptop. Trust the woman that writes novels for a living on a deadline. An outline will give you a clearer idea of where your characters are...

Wordsmithery: ignite your #writing with best-selling-author metrics

Having worked as a ghostwriter for eight years, writing nearly every day while working quickly and efficiently sparked my need to develop ninja wordsmithing skills. And for this, I turned to machine-editing tools. When I first started, I suffered some backlash from my writing friends. The common sentiment was...

#NaNoWriMo and a #Free #Writing Tool

(Beth Turnage Blog) So you are deep in NaNo and emotions run high. Perhaps you’ve finished a chapter or two, but then the dreaded crash. You know where you are heading but now you’ve become stuck in the mire. Because I write a lot of novels each year for...

NaNoWriMo 2019 Project: A Matter Of Time

(Beth Turnage Blog) For my NaNoWriMo project I’ve dusted off an older project, Cassandra Sees: A Matter of Time. Here is the blurb: When a Detective Dan Arrington investigating local murders finds a woman who knows more details about them than she should, can he believe she got those...

The Art of #Writing–Audit Your Novel’s #StoryStructure

You’ve sweated, plotted and struck the nubs of your fingers into your keyboard enough times to wear indentations into the keys. The first draft is in your hands. What do you do now? You fix it. Even best selling authors have to repair their story structure. Kevin Hearn gives...

The Art of #Writing–Audit Your Novel’s #StoryStructure

You’ve sweated, plotted and struck the nubs of your fingers into your keyboard enough times to wear indentations into the keys. The first draft is in your hands. What do you do now? You fix it. Even best selling authors have to repair their story structure. Kevin Hearn gives...

The Art of #Writing: #Plotting and #Pacing Using #Scrivener

You’ve plotted or pants your way through your novel, spent long months of taking your hero or heroine from there to back again, and then you read it. And die a little inside. Because even though you’ve created engaging characters, put them in gut twisting situations, and gave them...

The Art of #Writing: #Editing~Where Your Worst Fears Are Confirmed

You suck. As a writer. No really. That’s what you are thinking as you contemplate the editing of your work. It is where you confront your worst fears as you embark on the most dreaded of writer’s chores. Sometimes my first draft is so utterly cringe worthy, I can...

The Craft of #Writing: Lexical Density Compared to Writing Rules

I took some creative license in the title because we all know there aren’t any rules in writing. There is just some incredibly strong advice. The “rules” vary widely from writer to writer and even from genre to genre. But there do seem to be a few general “rules”...

The Craft of Writing: Lexical Density and You

According to the study, Success with Style: Using Writing Style to Predict the Success of Novels, by Stony Brook University’s Vikas Gajingunte Ashok, Song Feng, and Yejin Choi, whether or not a book will sell can be determined by several quantifiable factors. The researchers downloaded classic literature from the...