My thoughts and ideas on various topics, including advice about writing and getting published.
Will Twitter help your writing? By that I mean the act of writing, the craft, as opposed to the ability to promote your writing through a stream of hashtags, links, faves and re-tweets. Will expressing yourself 140 characters at a time over-constrain your ability to convey your thoughts, will it stifle your vision? Or will […]
In case you haven’t heard, indie publishing is cheapening literature. As the claim goes, the proliferation of self-published work and the lowering of the bar for what gets published create a cacophony of noise that threatens to drown out good books and their authors. This will drive down the quality of all published books, suppress […]
How’s your author portrait looking? Did it come from a cellphone selfie, or did you use your laptop’s webcam to capture it? Maybe it turned out OK, but… well, I’m seeing a lot of these around, at indie author Amazon pages, and they’re hurting. Bad lighting, no lighting, too wide an angle that makes you […]
If like me, you write or enjoy reading action-based fiction, nothing can kill a passage like the over-use of “to-be.” Maybe Shakespare’s Hamlet did ask a critical question, and as a guiding principle for what follows, we’ll answer it with a qualified “not to be.” Passive voice and just being I’m not going to get […]
The following will appear as the Afterword for my upcoming novel, Decisive Moment. Though it contains a slight hint of the ending, I don’t think it will spoil the story. All the same, you might want to defer its reading until after you finish the novel. If you know I hold a Christian world-view, after […]
Who do I write for? We should always know our intended audience, I heard somewhere. But even if we intellectually know them, do we consistently and unequivocally write for their benefit? I’ll tell you my short answer and then expand. I write for my readers. I write for their enjoyment and, if I can manage […]
Before you run away fearing this is some apologetic about how eBooks are better than print books, let me say the following. I recognize book signings don’t work very well with eBooks (working on that, though). I admit that eBooks make terrible flower drying devices, and they don’t hold baby’s locks of hair very well. […]
Have you ever read a book or story description that claims it is “character-driven”? What exactly does it mean for a character to drive a story’s plot? Is the author sitting at the keyboard while a bunch of unruly characters make him write this and that? Well, yes. No. It’s complicated. Maybe an example will […]
Ah, the purpose thing. I’ve been dreading writing this one. For some reason I want to spend the next four paragraphs permutating through variations of Steve Martin’s “special purpose” discussion in The Jerk. But if as Daniel H. Pink claims in Drive, Purpose, along with Autonomy and Mastery motivate us to work harder and produce […]
Does a job where you will never get better at what you’re doing excite you? When you examine your ability to write, are you satisfied with what you produce, or rather are you motivated to get better? If the latter, to what extent does that motivation drive your writing? If as Daniel H. Pink claims […]
