6 Ways to Approach Your Edits With Objectivity

Whether you appreciate his style or content, it is hard to deny that Kurt Vonnegut was a master of language—intelligent, creative, and meaningful. Here is his list of eight rules for writing a short story, from his collection Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction. : Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that…

Image courtesy of National Novel Writing Month In two days I will begin writing for National Novel Writing Month. Joining hundreds of thousands of other writers, I will produce about 1700+ words a day for 30 days. NaNoWriMo writers often describe themselves as either ‘Outliners’ or ‘Pantsers,’ that is, they write by outlining first or…

Whether you are writing nonfiction or a novel, research is almost always part of the process (or should be!). You might be a mystery novelist who writes your first draft, then turns to research to make your characters, settings, and topics more realistic and lively, adding the details and rewriting. Or perhaps you write historical…

Introduction In the last post, we discussed how to format your manuscript to prepare it for printing (whether it be for traditional publication or print-on-demand. Regardless of which path you take, it is often beneficial to prepare the manuscript for electronic publication as well. The content remains the same, of course, but the formatting is quite…

In the last post, I discussed how to prepare to write a book review: what questions to prepare beforehand, how to scan, read, question, and take notes. This article describes how to add the most important element of a professional book review: the critique. I try not to critique a book until I have been through…

In the two previous posts, I discussed how to format your manuscript to prepare it for print and to prepare it for ebook versions. We have dealt with the internal parts of the book; now we turn to the cover. While the content is the most important part of a work, you should not neglect the cover…