Polishing Public Speeches Most of us, at one time or another, were exposed to public speaking through our education. It may have been a college course, or even a high school class. Perhaps the entire semester was comprised of a series of speeches, or perhaps only a single speech was required in a wider communications class. Those courses taught us some of the basic principles of public speaking....

Point of View in Fiction – What’s Right and What’s Wrong The great Chinese ruler, Mao Tse Tung, once said, ‘In order to break the rules of a system, one must first learn and understand them.’ (Okay, I paraphrase – he was actually talking about Communism.) But so it is with POV in fiction. Learn the rules first, then you can break them. I get so many emails from writers asking how they should de...

Poetry in a Nutshell Poetry is more than just rhyming and prose that is in meters and verses. It is an art form. It is something that can not be judged by its cover and can not be critisized to the point where it just “sucks.” Poetry is about expression. Poetry expresses the way we feel on a certain subject through imagery and other senses. It helps us deal with our daily problems, be it good or ...

Playing Chicken With Your Story Part IV of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series And now we come to the hard bit. You’ve got your theme, and you’ve figured out how to bury it so that it’s there for you, and SOMETHING meaningful is there for your reader. You’ve let go of the temptation to write a message book—always difficult—and have embraced telling your story for the sake of the story. S...

Planning A Heart-Stopping Story Part VII of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series Over the last six lessons, you’ve figured out your theme, and you’ve worked out at least one and possibly several subthemes. You’ve learned how to use blended scenes, intercuts, and cliffhangers to work both themes and subthemes into your work. You have great conflict waiting to happen. What do you do next? A...

Pick a Theme for Your Next Storytelling Program Recently when I was asked to give a storytelling program at a Saturday night session hosted by our local MetroParks system, the woman who called wondered if I had a theme in mind. What a good idea! It not only helps with their write-up and advertising of the event, but also helps the storyteller plan a cohesive performance. Because I will be telling...

Parenting Tip: 7 Ways to Master Storytelling and Mesmerize Your Child Human beings have been telling stories for several millennia. And, as parents, we’ve all heard about the benefits of telling stories to our children. The only problem is that, as with so many things, no one ever teaches us how to tell a story. The best that most of us can do is to emulate our parents’ and teachers’ storytelling...

Now Appearing: 9 Tips for a Well-Attended Event When I made the decision to do free workshops and book signings for my latest book, Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer, I thought it would be easy to draw an audience.  I had, after all, done all the right things to prepare for this big event: I had a successful e-zine, AbsoluteWrite.com, sent weekly directly to my target market; I was a contr...

Nine Success Indicators for Tracking Your Book Marketing Results At the foundation of any successful marketing campaign are tracking systems—it’s helpful to know how your marketing program is doing. This is an area where I believe most authors (and possibly most business owners) drop the ball. It’s foolish to spend endless hours developing marketing strategies for selling your products without cr...