Over 100 Writing Tips & Tricks And Growing...
Characters
1. Great characters don't have flaws they have personality disorders.
2. Careful with too much or too little backstory for your character. Rule of Thumb: If you need backstory to understand a character well enough to write them then your readers need it too. Likewise, if it’s not plot relevant cut it.
3. Belief creates conflict. Your characters believe something and act according to those beliefs.
4. If your characters don’t care then we don’t care about them.
5. No one is truly evil, even the devil thinks he's the good guy from his perspective.
6. Characters must change. Those who can't inevitably die before the story is through.
7. Character conflicts must be both internal and external. Your characters should struggle with themselves, fears and desires, nature, the ticking clock, and with other characters.
8. The key to writing characters of the opposite sex and people of different ethnic groups honestly is writing more than one of them. Eventually you’ll run out of stereotypes.
9. Reactive heroes need relentless villains. And at some point in the story the hero must become active in pursuing their destiny/dreams/goals.
10. The hero doesn’t always have to succeed at his/her goal, but they must truly try for the reader to root for them.
11. The best main villains are often the anti-thesis of your story’s message and theme, the devil’s advocate to your hero’s ethical/moral compass.
12. Think long and hard about the theme of your story? What is the moral conclusion your reader and your characters will reach at the end of the story? Usually the hero or main protagonist will embody this trait or belief.
13. Now what is the counter argument? Play devil’s advocate for a moment. If you were debating someone and they were taking the moral stance brought up in your story, what would your counter points be? That will be the stance of the villain or main antagonist.
14. Multiple characters competing for the same thing or desiring opposite outcomes will lead to conflict. You want lots of conflict.
Structure
1. Every writer wants to be original, creative, and unique. So why follow silly rules and adhere to a ridged structure? You just want to sit down and write. Won't rules just smother creativity? Well, no, actually quite the opposite. Structure fuels creativity. You can't play a game without rules and you can't have life without gravity to ground it to the planet.
2. Avoid prologues and first chapters that have little to do with the main characters and story. Start your story with the inciting incident, the catalyst of the plot... the conflict that gets the ball/story rolling. Begin with the reason we’re sitting down for this story in the first place or you risk losing your reader's attention.
3. Structure fuels creativity. Staring at a blank screen does not. Outline, write a spine, use index cards, and take notes. These things are useful tools in the writer’s toolbox.
4. Only write in first person if your character’s voice is irresistible and the story would suffer without it. Otherwise use third person as default.
5. Use the end of scenes to create momentum and propel the plot and characters forward. Use dramatic reveals, cliff hangers, and revelations.
6. You can break scenes into five parts: dialogue, description, action, character's thoughts, and exposition. Balance is key, too much of one and not enough of another can spoil the whole pot.
7. Don't sweat the opening. The only job your first sentence has to do, besides tell a story of course, is make the reader read the second. And the only job the second sentence has to do is make the reader read the third. You can see a pattern here.
8. Withholding information is just as important as giving it. Mystery is a good thing.
9. Sequences build pace. Use long scenes, paragraphs, and sentences to slow down pace and short ones to quicken it.
10. Cutting creates story. The human brain adds the missing connections between images, whether on screen or in the mind’s eye, and fits them logically into a story sequence.
11. Chapters can be short as one sentence long. But you should be able to read a chapter in one sitting. That puts them generally at the short story limit, no more than eight thousand words. Any longer and you should consider splitting the chapter in two.
12. There can be multiple protagonists in a book, but only one main character at any one given moment/scene in the story.
13. The structure of a story can be divided into five parts or acts. The exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.
14. We start by introducing the characters, setting, theme, and the main goal of the hero. Then a problem arises and the hero pursues his goal. And in the conclusion in which the hero either fails or succeeds, and moves on with his changed life.
15. In simple terms we first get the hero up a tree, then we throw rocks at him, and finally we get him down. These acts or parts consist of individual scenes.
16. Only let your audience know where the story is going if they don’t want to go there. Destiny is always a bitch.
17. What is a scene? A scene is a span of pages, consisting of description and/or dialogue, in which a piece of dramatic action is played out between characters in a set location.
18. How long should a scene last? For as long as it takes to move the story forward to the next scene.
19. You should treat each scene like a mini novel. Each scene should have its own beginning, middle, and end. And should move the characters forward in the plot. If the story is a war, then it could be said that the scene is a battle.
20. Unless information is vital to the scene don’t include it. Less is more as the old saying goes.
21. Don't fear the outline. Just because you know the end doesn’t mean you know where you are going. This applies to any writing. Art is a series of decisions. An outline helps you organize these decisions in order.
22. An outline can just be a list of scenes in order with a simple headline to describe it. But always with an action verb in there somewhere, because scenes are about character actions:
Scene Outline
Scene one, Diner: Joe persuades Mary to go with him to the park.
Scene two, Park: Joe convinces Mary to help him get Carol to go out with him.
Scene three, Restaurant: Joe pressures Marl to find out what’s bugging her.
23. In each scene Mary will offer resistance and conflict will ensue as a result. Who wins is up to the story needs.
Dialogue
1. Dialogue is a form of dramatic action that is said for a specific reason: to accomplish a goal of the character.
2. Avoid being “too on the nose” when writing dialogue. Often the most dramatic bits of dialogue are the words not spoken but implied.
3. Easy on the exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!
4. Avoid using too many other words for “said”. Great dialogue doesn’t need much help from dialogue tags... he scoffed.
5. A person is what he/she does not what he/she says. People often say one thing and do the opposite. Actions make the character not words.
6. Secondary actions are not secondary. When characters speak their subtle and not so subtle gestures and actions reveal their personalities, thoughts, and feelings.
7. Don’t write about talking heads. In other words, scenes about people just standing around and talking with nothing but facial descriptions.
8. Remove tacked on junk words at the beginning of lines of dialogue. Yeah, um, OK, hey, yup, sure... No, it doesn't make your characters sound more real, just annoying.
9. Avoid long blocks of dialogue between characters. Real people don't monologue in conversations.
10. If a novel is a war and a scene is a battle between characters then dialogue is your ammunition. Conserve your bullets, make them count, and always aim for the heart.
11. Great dialogue comes from great characterization. Great characterizations are revealed through dialogue and action.
12. If you didn’t feel emotion writing that pivotal speech, neither will your readers reading it.
13. Avoid the sudden info dump. Dish out exposition like a formal full course meal, in small need-to-know stages.
Prose/Description
1. Be specific. Remove generic words that don’t inject images in the reader’s minds. Use specific exotic nouns to draw the reader into your description.
2. Inject the five senses into descriptions to pull the reader into your world. Sight, smell, touch, sound, and taste.
3. Great sentences multitask. They move plot, reveal character, set mood and tone, show the writer’s voice, and tell a story all at the same time.
4. Avoid negative information. Negative information tells us what did not happen instead of what did happen. It offers the reader no concrete information or images.
5. Avoid stating emotion. Mad, scared, and happy are telling not showing.
6. End sentences on powerful words. Use them to create theme, tone, and mood.
7. Limit the use of words that end with –ly… severely.
8. First impressions are everything. Characters introductions and physical descriptions should be memorable.
9. Avoid beginning and ending sentences with “it”. It is the least powerful word in the English dictionary.
10. Avoid weak, silly, and confusing similes and metaphors.
11. If you can't be witty, poetic, funny, or artsy with your sentences then use as few words as possible to get your point across. K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Stupid.
12. Great writing is remembering the details. What details do you remember about your most vivid memories and dreams and why? Use them in your writing.
13. Show, don’t tell the reader information whenever possible.
14. Small details add reality, a sense of place.
15. Shadows create drama.
16. Utilize the power of place. Characters live in environments not stage backgrounds.
Genre
1. Magic systems should have defined limitations. The more the merrier.
2. If the monster is only scary when the audience can’t see it then it was never scary to begin with. Real monsters are terrifying up close with the lights on.
3. Descriptions of the mundane in fantasy worlds can give them a sense of reality.
4. Readers usually believe the unbelievable if the characters on the page don’t. Suspension of disbelief fails if no one questions the bizarre and fantastical.
5. Be careful when satirizing something or someone you hate. It can come off as childish, mean-spirited, and people usually see through political bias and tune out. Intelligent satire comes from a wide array of emotions, including admiration.
6. Comedy is about... wait for it... here it comes... timing!
7. Magic should come with some kind of price otherwise people would use it for every little mundane chore or task in their daily life.
8. Why don't people rule your fantasy world with magic? It's silly to have wizards answer to kings if they have a monopoly on magic.
9. Aliens should have a very good and logical reason for invading Earth. The universe is a vast and resource abundant place and Earth is just a tiny insignificant speck in the grand scheme of things. So why us and why now?
10. Easy on the alien jargon. Don't be a Krtudhack.
11. The villain who always loses becomes a joke. Avoid the ultimate goal of taking over the world or destroying it, in each scenario the villain must lose for the story to continue. Break down those goals into stages or create different smaller ones. The tension rises if the reader doesn’t know whether the hero will succeed or not.
12. Empires don't really last much longer than 1,000 years in our real life history. Throwing out huge 10,000 year empires in your fantasy or science fiction world screams utopia. Once empires stop expanding they galvanize themselves and collapse under their own weight.
13. Just because it's fantasy doesn't mean the world or universe has to be at stake. A billion people are a number but one life at risk, especially one the reader has grown to love, can be the highest and most meaningful stake of all.
14. Magic that leads to Deus Ex Machina is the darkest magic of all.
15. Magic is better when it gets your hero into trouble not out of it.
16. If you write for children you should be reading to them on a regular basis. Volunteer to read at the local library or school if you’ve got none of your own. It pays to know your audience.
17. Magic systems should make sense in context of the world they originate from.
18. Classic magic systems originate from a higher power, whether from the gods, nature, or spirits. Modern magic systems often stem from energy, ki or chi, and are usually exhaustible or finite.
19. Magic systems don't necessarily need rules, the mystery of the great unknown can be a powerful thing that drives story and a sense of wonder and awe. But magic needs consistency and boundaries without it you run the risk of confusing the reader. Why does the hero use magic to get out of situation A and not B?
20. What's your fantasy world's currency and monetary system? How does their economy work?
21. Fashions come and go, no society wears the same style of clothes generation after generation.
Editing & Grammar
1. Keep your use of the verb "to be" to a minimum.
2. Cut description that doesn’t make sense or the reader might take literally: “Her eyes dropped to the floor.” Gross. “He caught the bird in the corner of his right eye.” Ouch.
3. Hide your manuscript in a shelf for a month or more after you've finished. Then take it out and read front to back with fresh eyes. You'll be amazed at what mistakes you'll find.
4. Cut the fat. Remove cluttering words. If you can say something with fewer words you probably should.
5. Second drafts should be 10% shorter as a general rule. So says the King.
6. Sniff out and murder the passive voice where ever you find it rearing its ugly head.
7. Read your work out loud. Fix what doesn’t sound right.
8. Readability is the number one priority. Making it good comes later. If great writing is confusing to the reader, then it's not great writing.
9. Cut too many eye/seeing words: gazed, peered, looked, scanned, observed etc. Most first drafts are riddled and plagued with them.
10. Polish, polish, and polish your work. Seriously no one likes reading a bunch of typos.
11. Cut needless/minor characters or combine them with others. One three-dimensional character is worth a thousand flat ones.
12. Start a scene as far into it as possible and end it the first chance you get.
13. Always pick the most economical/efficient path to telling a story. Treat words like money and pretend you're Mr. Scrooge.
14. Writing is editing and editing is writing. The sooner you have a rough draft to edit the sooner you can get to the real work.
15. When you think you’ve finished, sit down for another draft.
16. Avoid confusion with words and sentences, misspellings, changing of the word’s meaning (death vs. deaf)
17. Rewrite scenes from first person point of view. Get into character’s thoughts and emotions.
18. Easy on “thought” verbs.
19. Use participial phrases with care so they don’t sound awkward to the reader.
20. Easy on the adjectives.
21. Easy on the semicolons.
22. Passive Voice Alert! Avoid using: started to, began to. Just get straight to the action verb.
23. Passive Voice Alert! Avoid using “had” when possible.
24. Passive Voice Alert! Avoid using “was” if you can.
Marketing
1. The best titles will help the story stand out and tempt readers to sample the first page. Bad ones are like inside jokes. Readers shouldn’t have to read the book first to understand a title.
2. Avoid cliché book titles so you’re not 1 millionth to last on the Google/Bing/Amazon search engine.
3. Know your target audience. Research the sales of your specific genre, you may be surprised who’s buying.
4. Don't sweat every bad review. The worst reaction you can get from a reader of your work is no reaction at all. A lot of times high profile bad reviews can even increase sales. Any news is good news.
5. Search engines matter a lot. People can't buy what they can't find. Give serious thought to the key words and categories you list your work under.
6. Taste Makers, famous/semi-famous people with sizable social media followings, drive word of mouth and sharing of media.
7. Don't spam Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler, blogs everyday with book promos. You'll get more traffic and readers by being interesting, helpful, and funny than by hounding people.
8. Sharing is more important than advertising. And nothing drives sharing like surprising your audience by exceeding their expectations and giving them arousing emotional reactions,
9. The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. All marketing is just a matter of persuading people to buy what you're selling.
10. Know the difference between wants and needs, the difference between features and benefits, and the difference between benefits and deeper benefits.
11. Test out different price points (low 0.99 to high $10+) and keep accurate reports of consumer/reader purchasing habits. Chart everything. Thanks to the internet information is cheap but the right data is worth its weight in gold.
12. Lots of deals and freebies can drive in costumers but only if you have more than one thing to buy. Don't bother with marketing until you have multiple titles.
13. Add social media links/buttons on your web pages.
14. Writing a series is how most authors make their bread and butter. Writing just stand-a-lone novels is harder to make a living off of. Harder not impossible.
15. Pricing can be tricky. Most new SP authors either over or under price their work. A cheap price tag can signal a cheap product. And a high price can be repulsive. Always look to what's selling and at what price.
The Publishing Business: Agents, Editors, Contracts, and More
1. Don’t chase the market. Writing and publishing are slow beasts, moving at a snail's pace. And trends come and go like cheetahs.
2. Never try to publish something you wouldn’t read out loud to a group of strangers.
3. Be careful what you wish for. Success can be a double edge sword. Too much success can bring on serious writer’s block and fear of not meeting past achievements. Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell both struck gold with their debut novels, unfortunately they never wrote another.
4. Don’t buy the Big Break lie. Real achievement/success does not come out of thin air or divine luck but from years of hard work, dedication, passion, persistence, networking, and grit. Getting published is not like winning the lottery. You don't have to work after you win the lottery but in publishing once you get published the real work begins.
5. Write for yourself but keep an audience in mind.
6. Success is not sexy but born from difficult boring repetitive work.
7. Writers of fiction are the literary equivalent of drug dealers, readers are the addicts, and the drug of choice is emotion. Give them what they crave and they'll keep coming back for more.
8. Develop and follow your voice, it’s all you’ve got that separates you from the crowd.
Characters
1. Great characters don't have flaws they have personality disorders.
2. Careful with too much or too little backstory for your character. Rule of Thumb: If you need backstory to understand a character well enough to write them then your readers need it too. Likewise, if it’s not plot relevant cut it.
3. Belief creates conflict. Your characters believe something and act according to those beliefs.
4. If your characters don’t care then we don’t care about them.
5. No one is truly evil, even the devil thinks he's the good guy from his perspective.
6. Characters must change. Those who can't inevitably die before the story is through.
7. Character conflicts must be both internal and external. Your characters should struggle with themselves, fears and desires, nature, the ticking clock, and with other characters.
8. The key to writing characters of the opposite sex and people of different ethnic groups honestly is writing more than one of them. Eventually you’ll run out of stereotypes.
9. Reactive heroes need relentless villains. And at some point in the story the hero must become active in pursuing their destiny/dreams/goals.
10. The hero doesn’t always have to succeed at his/her goal, but they must truly try for the reader to root for them.
11. The best main villains are often the anti-thesis of your story’s message and theme, the devil’s advocate to your hero’s ethical/moral compass.
12. Think long and hard about the theme of your story? What is the moral conclusion your reader and your characters will reach at the end of the story? Usually the hero or main protagonist will embody this trait or belief.
13. Now what is the counter argument? Play devil’s advocate for a moment. If you were debating someone and they were taking the moral stance brought up in your story, what would your counter points be? That will be the stance of the villain or main antagonist.
14. Multiple characters competing for the same thing or desiring opposite outcomes will lead to conflict. You want lots of conflict.
Structure
1. Every writer wants to be original, creative, and unique. So why follow silly rules and adhere to a ridged structure? You just want to sit down and write. Won't rules just smother creativity? Well, no, actually quite the opposite. Structure fuels creativity. You can't play a game without rules and you can't have life without gravity to ground it to the planet.
2. Avoid prologues and first chapters that have little to do with the main characters and story. Start your story with the inciting incident, the catalyst of the plot... the conflict that gets the ball/story rolling. Begin with the reason we’re sitting down for this story in the first place or you risk losing your reader's attention.
3. Structure fuels creativity. Staring at a blank screen does not. Outline, write a spine, use index cards, and take notes. These things are useful tools in the writer’s toolbox.
4. Only write in first person if your character’s voice is irresistible and the story would suffer without it. Otherwise use third person as default.
5. Use the end of scenes to create momentum and propel the plot and characters forward. Use dramatic reveals, cliff hangers, and revelations.
6. You can break scenes into five parts: dialogue, description, action, character's thoughts, and exposition. Balance is key, too much of one and not enough of another can spoil the whole pot.
7. Don't sweat the opening. The only job your first sentence has to do, besides tell a story of course, is make the reader read the second. And the only job the second sentence has to do is make the reader read the third. You can see a pattern here.
8. Withholding information is just as important as giving it. Mystery is a good thing.
9. Sequences build pace. Use long scenes, paragraphs, and sentences to slow down pace and short ones to quicken it.
10. Cutting creates story. The human brain adds the missing connections between images, whether on screen or in the mind’s eye, and fits them logically into a story sequence.
11. Chapters can be short as one sentence long. But you should be able to read a chapter in one sitting. That puts them generally at the short story limit, no more than eight thousand words. Any longer and you should consider splitting the chapter in two.
12. There can be multiple protagonists in a book, but only one main character at any one given moment/scene in the story.
13. The structure of a story can be divided into five parts or acts. The exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.
14. We start by introducing the characters, setting, theme, and the main goal of the hero. Then a problem arises and the hero pursues his goal. And in the conclusion in which the hero either fails or succeeds, and moves on with his changed life.
15. In simple terms we first get the hero up a tree, then we throw rocks at him, and finally we get him down. These acts or parts consist of individual scenes.
16. Only let your audience know where the story is going if they don’t want to go there. Destiny is always a bitch.
17. What is a scene? A scene is a span of pages, consisting of description and/or dialogue, in which a piece of dramatic action is played out between characters in a set location.
18. How long should a scene last? For as long as it takes to move the story forward to the next scene.
19. You should treat each scene like a mini novel. Each scene should have its own beginning, middle, and end. And should move the characters forward in the plot. If the story is a war, then it could be said that the scene is a battle.
20. Unless information is vital to the scene don’t include it. Less is more as the old saying goes.
21. Don't fear the outline. Just because you know the end doesn’t mean you know where you are going. This applies to any writing. Art is a series of decisions. An outline helps you organize these decisions in order.
22. An outline can just be a list of scenes in order with a simple headline to describe it. But always with an action verb in there somewhere, because scenes are about character actions:
Scene Outline
Scene one, Diner: Joe persuades Mary to go with him to the park.
Scene two, Park: Joe convinces Mary to help him get Carol to go out with him.
Scene three, Restaurant: Joe pressures Marl to find out what’s bugging her.
23. In each scene Mary will offer resistance and conflict will ensue as a result. Who wins is up to the story needs.
Dialogue
1. Dialogue is a form of dramatic action that is said for a specific reason: to accomplish a goal of the character.
2. Avoid being “too on the nose” when writing dialogue. Often the most dramatic bits of dialogue are the words not spoken but implied.
3. Easy on the exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!
4. Avoid using too many other words for “said”. Great dialogue doesn’t need much help from dialogue tags... he scoffed.
5. A person is what he/she does not what he/she says. People often say one thing and do the opposite. Actions make the character not words.
6. Secondary actions are not secondary. When characters speak their subtle and not so subtle gestures and actions reveal their personalities, thoughts, and feelings.
7. Don’t write about talking heads. In other words, scenes about people just standing around and talking with nothing but facial descriptions.
8. Remove tacked on junk words at the beginning of lines of dialogue. Yeah, um, OK, hey, yup, sure... No, it doesn't make your characters sound more real, just annoying.
9. Avoid long blocks of dialogue between characters. Real people don't monologue in conversations.
10. If a novel is a war and a scene is a battle between characters then dialogue is your ammunition. Conserve your bullets, make them count, and always aim for the heart.
11. Great dialogue comes from great characterization. Great characterizations are revealed through dialogue and action.
12. If you didn’t feel emotion writing that pivotal speech, neither will your readers reading it.
13. Avoid the sudden info dump. Dish out exposition like a formal full course meal, in small need-to-know stages.
Prose/Description
1. Be specific. Remove generic words that don’t inject images in the reader’s minds. Use specific exotic nouns to draw the reader into your description.
2. Inject the five senses into descriptions to pull the reader into your world. Sight, smell, touch, sound, and taste.
3. Great sentences multitask. They move plot, reveal character, set mood and tone, show the writer’s voice, and tell a story all at the same time.
4. Avoid negative information. Negative information tells us what did not happen instead of what did happen. It offers the reader no concrete information or images.
5. Avoid stating emotion. Mad, scared, and happy are telling not showing.
6. End sentences on powerful words. Use them to create theme, tone, and mood.
7. Limit the use of words that end with –ly… severely.
8. First impressions are everything. Characters introductions and physical descriptions should be memorable.
9. Avoid beginning and ending sentences with “it”. It is the least powerful word in the English dictionary.
10. Avoid weak, silly, and confusing similes and metaphors.
11. If you can't be witty, poetic, funny, or artsy with your sentences then use as few words as possible to get your point across. K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Stupid.
12. Great writing is remembering the details. What details do you remember about your most vivid memories and dreams and why? Use them in your writing.
13. Show, don’t tell the reader information whenever possible.
14. Small details add reality, a sense of place.
15. Shadows create drama.
16. Utilize the power of place. Characters live in environments not stage backgrounds.
Genre
1. Magic systems should have defined limitations. The more the merrier.
2. If the monster is only scary when the audience can’t see it then it was never scary to begin with. Real monsters are terrifying up close with the lights on.
3. Descriptions of the mundane in fantasy worlds can give them a sense of reality.
4. Readers usually believe the unbelievable if the characters on the page don’t. Suspension of disbelief fails if no one questions the bizarre and fantastical.
5. Be careful when satirizing something or someone you hate. It can come off as childish, mean-spirited, and people usually see through political bias and tune out. Intelligent satire comes from a wide array of emotions, including admiration.
6. Comedy is about... wait for it... here it comes... timing!
7. Magic should come with some kind of price otherwise people would use it for every little mundane chore or task in their daily life.
8. Why don't people rule your fantasy world with magic? It's silly to have wizards answer to kings if they have a monopoly on magic.
9. Aliens should have a very good and logical reason for invading Earth. The universe is a vast and resource abundant place and Earth is just a tiny insignificant speck in the grand scheme of things. So why us and why now?
10. Easy on the alien jargon. Don't be a Krtudhack.
11. The villain who always loses becomes a joke. Avoid the ultimate goal of taking over the world or destroying it, in each scenario the villain must lose for the story to continue. Break down those goals into stages or create different smaller ones. The tension rises if the reader doesn’t know whether the hero will succeed or not.
12. Empires don't really last much longer than 1,000 years in our real life history. Throwing out huge 10,000 year empires in your fantasy or science fiction world screams utopia. Once empires stop expanding they galvanize themselves and collapse under their own weight.
13. Just because it's fantasy doesn't mean the world or universe has to be at stake. A billion people are a number but one life at risk, especially one the reader has grown to love, can be the highest and most meaningful stake of all.
14. Magic that leads to Deus Ex Machina is the darkest magic of all.
15. Magic is better when it gets your hero into trouble not out of it.
16. If you write for children you should be reading to them on a regular basis. Volunteer to read at the local library or school if you’ve got none of your own. It pays to know your audience.
17. Magic systems should make sense in context of the world they originate from.
18. Classic magic systems originate from a higher power, whether from the gods, nature, or spirits. Modern magic systems often stem from energy, ki or chi, and are usually exhaustible or finite.
19. Magic systems don't necessarily need rules, the mystery of the great unknown can be a powerful thing that drives story and a sense of wonder and awe. But magic needs consistency and boundaries without it you run the risk of confusing the reader. Why does the hero use magic to get out of situation A and not B?
20. What's your fantasy world's currency and monetary system? How does their economy work?
21. Fashions come and go, no society wears the same style of clothes generation after generation.
Editing & Grammar
1. Keep your use of the verb "to be" to a minimum.
2. Cut description that doesn’t make sense or the reader might take literally: “Her eyes dropped to the floor.” Gross. “He caught the bird in the corner of his right eye.” Ouch.
3. Hide your manuscript in a shelf for a month or more after you've finished. Then take it out and read front to back with fresh eyes. You'll be amazed at what mistakes you'll find.
4. Cut the fat. Remove cluttering words. If you can say something with fewer words you probably should.
5. Second drafts should be 10% shorter as a general rule. So says the King.
6. Sniff out and murder the passive voice where ever you find it rearing its ugly head.
7. Read your work out loud. Fix what doesn’t sound right.
8. Readability is the number one priority. Making it good comes later. If great writing is confusing to the reader, then it's not great writing.
9. Cut too many eye/seeing words: gazed, peered, looked, scanned, observed etc. Most first drafts are riddled and plagued with them.
10. Polish, polish, and polish your work. Seriously no one likes reading a bunch of typos.
11. Cut needless/minor characters or combine them with others. One three-dimensional character is worth a thousand flat ones.
12. Start a scene as far into it as possible and end it the first chance you get.
13. Always pick the most economical/efficient path to telling a story. Treat words like money and pretend you're Mr. Scrooge.
14. Writing is editing and editing is writing. The sooner you have a rough draft to edit the sooner you can get to the real work.
15. When you think you’ve finished, sit down for another draft.
16. Avoid confusion with words and sentences, misspellings, changing of the word’s meaning (death vs. deaf)
17. Rewrite scenes from first person point of view. Get into character’s thoughts and emotions.
18. Easy on “thought” verbs.
19. Use participial phrases with care so they don’t sound awkward to the reader.
20. Easy on the adjectives.
21. Easy on the semicolons.
22. Passive Voice Alert! Avoid using: started to, began to. Just get straight to the action verb.
23. Passive Voice Alert! Avoid using “had” when possible.
24. Passive Voice Alert! Avoid using “was” if you can.
Marketing
1. The best titles will help the story stand out and tempt readers to sample the first page. Bad ones are like inside jokes. Readers shouldn’t have to read the book first to understand a title.
2. Avoid cliché book titles so you’re not 1 millionth to last on the Google/Bing/Amazon search engine.
3. Know your target audience. Research the sales of your specific genre, you may be surprised who’s buying.
4. Don't sweat every bad review. The worst reaction you can get from a reader of your work is no reaction at all. A lot of times high profile bad reviews can even increase sales. Any news is good news.
5. Search engines matter a lot. People can't buy what they can't find. Give serious thought to the key words and categories you list your work under.
6. Taste Makers, famous/semi-famous people with sizable social media followings, drive word of mouth and sharing of media.
7. Don't spam Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler, blogs everyday with book promos. You'll get more traffic and readers by being interesting, helpful, and funny than by hounding people.
8. Sharing is more important than advertising. And nothing drives sharing like surprising your audience by exceeding their expectations and giving them arousing emotional reactions,
9. The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. All marketing is just a matter of persuading people to buy what you're selling.
10. Know the difference between wants and needs, the difference between features and benefits, and the difference between benefits and deeper benefits.
11. Test out different price points (low 0.99 to high $10+) and keep accurate reports of consumer/reader purchasing habits. Chart everything. Thanks to the internet information is cheap but the right data is worth its weight in gold.
12. Lots of deals and freebies can drive in costumers but only if you have more than one thing to buy. Don't bother with marketing until you have multiple titles.
13. Add social media links/buttons on your web pages.
14. Writing a series is how most authors make their bread and butter. Writing just stand-a-lone novels is harder to make a living off of. Harder not impossible.
15. Pricing can be tricky. Most new SP authors either over or under price their work. A cheap price tag can signal a cheap product. And a high price can be repulsive. Always look to what's selling and at what price.
The Publishing Business: Agents, Editors, Contracts, and More
1. Don’t chase the market. Writing and publishing are slow beasts, moving at a snail's pace. And trends come and go like cheetahs.
2. Never try to publish something you wouldn’t read out loud to a group of strangers.
3. Be careful what you wish for. Success can be a double edge sword. Too much success can bring on serious writer’s block and fear of not meeting past achievements. Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell both struck gold with their debut novels, unfortunately they never wrote another.
4. Don’t buy the Big Break lie. Real achievement/success does not come out of thin air or divine luck but from years of hard work, dedication, passion, persistence, networking, and grit. Getting published is not like winning the lottery. You don't have to work after you win the lottery but in publishing once you get published the real work begins.
5. Write for yourself but keep an audience in mind.
6. Success is not sexy but born from difficult boring repetitive work.
7. Writers of fiction are the literary equivalent of drug dealers, readers are the addicts, and the drug of choice is emotion. Give them what they crave and they'll keep coming back for more.
8. Develop and follow your voice, it’s all you’ve got that separates you from the crowd.