One of the hardest scenes to successfully write is the love scene. In your mind you may picture a moving, romantic interlude, but down on paper, you find it reads like melodrama—or worse. This can spell disaster for your novel, particularly if the entire book is building to this scene and it needs to be stupendous to carry the story …
Read MoreAuthors: Beware the Fake-Quotation Trap!
For authors, the Internet offers broad vistas of knowledge and opportunity, but scattered in between are a few beds of quicksand. One of these is the fake-quotation quagmire: the growing trend of popular “quotation websites” to feature made-up quotes. The quagmire deepens each time a self-publishing author casually decides to decorate her writing with “something inspirational” …
Read MoreOops! Your Exposition Is Showing
Does your dialog writing sound natural or off-kilter? Does it read like real people talk, or like grade school children stumbling over their parts in a play? If you have patches of dialog in your novel that just don’t ring true, it may be because your exposition is showing …
Read MoreSelf-Published Book Contests & The Eric Hoffer Award—Horse of a Different Color
Banish These 2 ‘Stammer Verbs’ from Your Fiction Writing
Just as stammering halts speech, stammer verbs halt the flow of a written sentence. The author uses these verbs as if stammering around while searching for the genuine words she’s intending. Two verbs in particular are repeatedly used in a stammering way by many beginning novelists. Let’s take a look at these little suckers and identify why they pose problems for your story …
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