Every successful novel is made up of several pillars—character development, conflict and plot, setting, pacing, and so on—and these elements work together to create an engaging, hard-to-put-down book. Each of the pillars relies on the other, just like a building. The same is true about… Read More »The Pillars of Writing: Everything You Need to Write Great Fiction
Setting is the location and time in which the book’s story takes place. A novel’s setting can include geography and time period, and can take place on Earth (past, present, or future) or in a made-up world. A novel’s setting is one of the elements… Read More »How to Avoid Infodumps in Your Novel
So you want to improve your writing. But how do you do that? You can take extensive writing classes and dedicate X amount of hours every day pounding on the keyboard. Or, you can read published work that the greatest literary geniuses of our time have provided… Read More »Stephen King’s Top 10 Tips for Becoming a Better Writer
Dialogue tags! These little monsters can sometimes be tricky, but you can’t avoid them: Dialogue should make up about 20% of your novel. When approaching the subject of dialogue and dialogue tags, there are a few things that should be kept in mind in order… Read More »5 Essential Rules of Writing Powerful Dialogue
“Be sure to show—don’t tell—what’s going on in your story.” As a writer, you’ve probably heard these words of advice many times before (maybe even from me!). But what does it mean? What’s the difference between showing and telling? When you “tell” information, you’re informing your reader of something… Read More »3 Ways to Show, Not Tell
When using song lyrics in your book, it’s important to do your homework. If you’re not careful about obtaining permissions where necessary, you can be sued for copyright infringement (yikes).To obtain permission on using song lyrics in your book, you must first determine who is… Read More »How to Use Song Lyrics in Your Book
Ready to pull back the curtain on your life? Write a memoir. I have edited my fair share of memoirs, and I’ve always respected an author who has written about a painful or memorable part of their life. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, after… Read More »3 Important Rules for Using Real Names in Memoirs
The preface, the introduction, and the foreword of a book are introductory pieces that belong in a book’s front matter—before Chapter 1. Many authors think that these are all interchangeable terms, but this is a common misconception. So what’s the difference between a preface, introduction,… Read More »Preface, Introduction, or Foreword: What’s the Difference?
Every time I go through an author’s manuscript, I find words or phrases that don’t always lend themselves to making the author sound eloquent. To put it a different way: Too much wordiness in a sentence can make an author sound amateurish. As a book editor, one of… Read More »#1 Tip for Avoiding Wordiness in Your Novel
Many times, I’ve checked back with a client on the progress of their manuscript only to find that they haven’t made much progress at all. “What happened?” I ask them, expecting something major—like a house fire, a financial catastrophe, or a death in the family.… Read More »How to Overcome Writer’s Block