Tag: writing

AI Secrets To Kick Start Your Writing: #2—Outline Your Chapter

What’s the biggest obstacle a writer faces? Even if you have outlined your book. Staring at the page for the start of that new chapter. Endlessly. All writers do this—even famous ones. Take, for instance, Sylvia Plath: Sylvia Plath (from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath) Monday, July 7 (1958):...

5 Stellar Ways to Use #AI in Your #Writing—#1 Rough Outline Your Novel

Forget the controversy over whether to use AI in your prose. This issue will shake out as writers use AI more and develop best practices in writing fiction with AI. This tool can help you with mundane writing tasks that help to speed up your work without arguments over...

Ask A #Writer: Is It Worth It To Be One?

Ask a Writer Asked and answered on Quora. The Original Question: Is it worth to be an author? It’s the best thing ever, but not for the reasons you think. 1) Your time is your own. You can wake up when you want to, sleep when it suits you,...

#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...

The craft of #writing: ratcheting chapter tension

Like a pinball, your story bounces around in your head, hitting your occipital lobe, hippocampus, and the front of your brain, lighting them all up with the act of creation. If you are a master writer, you light up the caudate nucleus, which handles skills gained over time. Creating...

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...

The Craft of #Writing: Grabbing the Reader

(Beth Turnage) I’ve written posts on Quora on writing and thought I’d curate some here. You can call it laziness, but really it’s a lack of time, since ghostwriting is keeping me very busy. Really. When writing, how do you grab your reader’s attention as quickly as possible? How...

Ooh! A Question about Lexical Density

(Beth Turnage Blog) What are the possible factors that lessens the lexical density in writing?? A question in a comment? Yes! I was so tickled that I decided to devote an entire blog post to it. And I won’t just tell you. I’ll show you, and to do so...

The Craft of #Writing: Brain Secrets of Lexical Density

Writing is hard. Difficult. Okay, it’s the kick in your stomach when you are working like a demon to scrape the words out of your dissolute soul.The words refuse to arrive like the A-list celebrities you invited to your party. Your characters snottily refuse to talk to you, your...

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...