Recently, I purchased “Story trumps structure”, by Steven James. I was attracted to the book by its provocative title and the foreward by Donald Maass, who I much admire. Although the book is mostly a manifesto for organic writing (‘pantsing’), as opposed to plotting and outlining, it is still an excellent read for all types …
Category: For newbie authors
The First Cut
In my last blog, I said I was taking some time out from writing as I needed to think more deeply about where the plot-line of my new novel was taking me. After a short break, I looked again at the manuscript, which was about a third complete, and my scene cards. In spite of …
Learning to write from the best writers
I love to read science fiction. When I’m not writing myself I can usually be found reading — a sci-fi novel, or if not sci-fi, a book about the craft of writing. Recently, I realised I needed to take a break from writing my new novel. I had reached a point where I needed to …
Editing your manuscript
Whether you’re a self published indie author or a traditionally published author, your readers will judge you by the quality of your writing. Not only must you produce an amazing story, with characters that connect emotionally with you readers, but the finished product must be professionally finished and error free (or virtually error free). For …
Finding the story
For me, one of the most difficult aspects of writing is finding the story. Finding ideas is no problem: everyone has ideas. How many times have you been told that by someone that he or she has a great idea for a book? But an idea alone does not make a story. It’s the next …
Publishing print-books and e-books using Scrivener
In a recent blog, ‘Indie Publishing on a Shoestring’, I wrote about how you can use Scrivener to create mobi, epub, and pdf files for publishing on Amazon, Createspace, and other e-distributors, such as BookBaby, Smashwords, and Draft2Digital. The reason I wrote the blog was to convince new indie authors that it wasn’t that difficult …
Continue reading Publishing print-books and e-books using Scrivener
What makes a great writer
Have you read a book you simply couldn’t put down? Have you ever thought about how the writer did that — kept you engrossed in the story? In contrast, have you ever read a book where you’ve found yourself skipping through passages to speed up the story? The difference between these two books is that …
Indie Publishing on a shoestring
When I started writing my first novel, I knew exactly what I was letting myself in for. During my career as an accountant, I had published a number of books albeit of a technical nature. I knew it took perseverance to produce the first draft of any book. But it doesn’t stop there. It can …
Story structure and story beats
In some of my previous blogs I've talked about the importance of story structure. It's a subject that's fascinated me since I first started writing fiction. Some great writers ridicule the idea of an underlying story structure as being too formulaic. They say it's based too much on the 'hero's mythical journey' or it's not …
There’s no such thing as writer’s block
That’s what I thought until a young writer contacted me recently asking for ideas of how to get around writer’s block. She had had some success as a writer and was finding it hard to get started again. That very success seemed to be the cause of her anxiety, and that was holding her back …
JMJ Williamson 