Learning How To Write As a student of Spanish, my goal was to think in Spanish. Skip the word-by-word translation so I’d have the necessary speed to speak and listen. I know words in Spanish that I’d be hard pressed to translate. Usually profanity, I confess. Chingow! For years my students here in China have studied grammar, and know it better than you or I. They read. They write. But speaking i...

Learn to let go – the book is finished Nothing ticks me off more than an Author who is constantly changing and revising their book after publication. Some Authors do this every couple of weeks and it is as though they are obsessed with a perfection very few of them will ever attain. I find it very frustrating and there I am thinking, Go away and stop wasting my time. Eventually I will snap and te...

I Can’t Put It Down – How to Write Compelling Fiction How many times have you heard people say this about a book? Have you ever analyzed the books that people say this about? I have. They all share one ‘secret’ in common. Questions. Reading is not a passive exercise. Not to the brain, anyway. As you read and take in the information on the page, the brain is trying to work out where the story ...

The Value of 99 Cents These days, with so much free–YouTube has free music, Amazon has free downloads, libraries (for the most part) have free books, and the Internet has Free Everything–how does anyone manage to sell their wares? The answer, from one corner of the creative industries in particular, seems to be pricing countless items at $0.99: ebooks, MP3 tracks, TV shows, etc. But how does one...

Great Fiction Comes From Writing Lightly Great fiction appears effortless to the reader. The characters and setting are so real, the story so believable, that the reader is completely unaware of the author behind the words. The smoothness of the text belies the hours of hard work and practice that went into its creation. The authors who achieve invisibility have learned the art of writing lightly...

Giving Up Too Soon So you feel beaten up and bruised and you’re ready to quit.  You have no support system or the one you have is pathetically inadequate for the goals you’ve set.  You’re so tired that the couch is looking more and more inviting everyday.  You have bills piling up and you probably ought to get a real job anyway. The failure rate is statistically high and nobody is going to fault...

Give More Than You Get A member of one of my writing groups confided in me that she was fed up with the way that she was feeling used by other writers. This writer is very talented and accomplished, and she’s a member of a few different groups that trade feedback and critiques of each other’s work. “I feel like I get back 10% of what I put in,” she said. And she was losing her energy, thinking ab...

Got the Contract! Now What? Hooray! You wrote a great book/screenplay/book proposal/short story/etc., and someone has offered you a contract. Congratulations. Before you eagerly sign on the dotted line, though, it’s very important to know what you’re signing, and educate yourself about what all the terms mean. If you have an agent or attorney, great. But if not, what do you do? Publishing and e...

Good Reasons Why You Can’t Rely on Your Spellchecker If you are reading this article, then you probably own a computer (or are at least using a computer to read it). I will make the underlying assumption, then, that you currently use your computer’s word processing software for writing and creating documents. I’m going to stick my neck right into that noose hanging out there on the Assumption Tre...