Read Good Books

Fill your mind with effective examples.

The past two weeks I’ve been spending six hours a day editing someone’s novel.

The author’s a solid storyteller, but his mechanics are weak. So I’m taking pains to fix the punctuation on nearly every sentence. And the dialogue attribution. And much of the spelling. Plus some of the verb tenses. I can work no more than an hour at a … Continue reading

A Task Too Big

Take it a little at a time.

If you’re daunted by writing your book, consider this old joke:

How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.

Still, authorship means more than writing one word after another. You face multiple tasks. But broken into many small steps, any job can become feasible.

My father-in-law and I just completed a … Continue reading

Fun Lessons in Point of View

Some helps for mastering this fiction skill.

 by Andy Scheer

A new writer said she had trouble grasping the principles of point of view (POV).

“Just think of it,” I said, “as equaling which person’s senses through which you are experiencing a scene.” Continue reading