Title Matters: How to Choose the Perfect Title for Your Short Story

A title is the gateway to a story's world. It's the first impression, the hook that draws readers in, and can be the first signal of 'tone' in your story. However, crafting the right title for your short story is challenging. So, how do you choose the perfect title? Here are a few things IContinue reading "Title Matters: How to Choose the Perfect Title for Your Short Story"

The Writer’s Journey: Crafting a Personal Roadmap to Writing Success

There is no official road map to becoming a successful writer (if I am mistaken on this point, and just no one told me about it - please share it now!). As a result, we are faced with a hundred different approaches and no guidance on which to take. Do we focus on building aContinue reading "The Writer’s Journey: Crafting a Personal Roadmap to Writing Success"

Setting SMARTER Writing Goals – Part II

So in the first part I reviewed the acronym SMARTER. If you haven't read that, this part won't make sense so if you'd like to review just go here. For those of you up to date, we had used this framework to create an example goal saying that if what I was excited about wasContinue reading "Setting SMARTER Writing Goals – Part II"

Setting SMARTER Writing Goals – Part I

Project management tools can be useful for writers, and help you stay on track. The first step in using these is setting effective goals. There are a number of frameworks that can be used. My preference is the mnemonic S.M.A.R.T.E.R. goals, an acronym that stands for: Specific - If you want to target word count,Continue reading "Setting SMARTER Writing Goals – Part I"

Writers: Do Your own Thing

All of the typical goals we have as beginning writers - writing for publication in a magazine, or to win a writing contest, push us to follow convention. To look at what exists, what has won, what has been published by that magazine, and make something that will win over the same editor. In otherContinue reading "Writers: Do Your own Thing"

Making Unlikable Characters… Likable

One challenge all writers face is ensuring the characters they write about have some minimal level of likability. After all, if no one likes anything about your characters, who is going to want to read about them? This can be especially challenging if you are writing a reprehensible character. The most common approach is toContinue reading "Making Unlikable Characters… Likable"

Experimenting with Dictation for Writing

Belonging to writers' groups there's always a lot of ideas that are thrown around. One of them is using voice dictation. While I have experimented with this to create fiction, it has never been terribly successful for me. It seems that for fiction at least my voice goes more rapidly than my brain. However, theContinue reading "Experimenting with Dictation for Writing"

Polishing Manuscripts and Catching Errors with Text to Voice

One of the long-known editing tricks is to read the piece you are editing out loud to yourself. It can help you catch wrong words, awkward phrasing, homonyms, repeated words, repeated sentence structures, confusing punctuation, overlong sentences (like this one), etc. However, this can get tedious, and also, you do not always read what isContinue reading "Polishing Manuscripts and Catching Errors with Text to Voice"

Developing Your Writing Toolkit

How do you develop the range or adaptability of your unique writer's voice? One thing that I have found helpful in making progress in this is - ironically - imitating others. If you were learning to speak another language, and wanted to sound natural you probably would not settle for just 'being understood' - justContinue reading "Developing Your Writing Toolkit"