It’s Never A Good Time To Skip Out On Your Critique Group

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Writers are a tight-knit group in general, and why wouldn’t we be? Professional writing is one of the most challenging careers around. The desire to quit is constantly nagging at us because so few authors reach a notable level of success, while most of us struggle to publish and market our books. If your in-person critique group has been canceled, now is not the time, even in the middle of …

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Suspension of Disbelief

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Any fiction book relies on suspension of disbelief by the reader. They forgo belief in some aspect of the real world to believe in the story-world. Science fiction and fantasy stretch belief to the limits requiring genre authors to exert great care to avoid “breaking the spell”. At some point in a story this happens: The doorbell rings, and John opens the door. Standing on the porch is a three-foot-tall, …

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Point Of View

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Trends In a list of the twenty most popular science fictions books of 2019, 60% were written in third-person point-of-view (POV), 40% in 1st person and none in second person. Although the story in each novel is very inventive, the authors adhere to the rules of point-of-view, much like punctuation and grammar. First-person POV is recognized by use of the pronoun “I” or “we” whereas third-person uses “he” or “she”. …

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Deep Third Person Point-Of-View

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What if you want to write a story with a personal, emotional and introspective point of view? You would have two basic choices: First person: The heat of the dragon’s breath warmed my face, increasing the pounding in my chest. Deep 3rd person: The heat of the dragon’s breath warmed his face, increasing the pounding in his chest. Before the 1980’s (prior to deep POV acceptance) the second option would …

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Five Lessons from NaNoWriMo

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NaNoWriMo seemed intimidating. Until last month, I’d only written short stories. How could a hack like me possibly write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days? What if my story is pathetic? Can’t they schedule this for a month without a major US holiday? Many of my writer friends were participating, but I heard my mother’s voice from beyond the grave. “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you …

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Word Processor for Novels

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The best word processor is the one that connects your brain directly to the page. Alas, that’s not something speculative fiction writers can purchase, yet. If you are writing a novel, use a tool appropriate to the job. Any word processor works well for the first scene, but what about: backing up automatically editing, spell checking and grammar checking shuffling scenes moving chapters making a table of contents using sections …

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Starting Points for Planning Your Novel and More

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Why plan a story before writing? Because planning tremendously decreases the time needed to edit the story later. The planning process and depth are different for every author. However, there are some good starting points: Don’t make the planning process painful Do give yourself down-time to let the subconscious mind generate ideas Start with the big picture — the story world — what is it like? sight, sound, smell, taste …

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Sentence Variation

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Ever wonder how some authors create flowing prose? They do it with a variety of sentences having different beginnings, different constructions and different lengths. This does not come naturally to all authors, but the techniques can be learned. Begin by collecting data from your own writing — take a page and make a list of sentence beginnings, length and narrative type. Edit your work as needed: the key is to …

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