What makes a best-seller? No one has a definitive answer, but mine satisfies me: The reader never sees the words. Got your attention, didn't I? Well, the real title of this is The Psychology of Reading; What's Going on In a Reader's Mind, which is a goal all writers...
The Art of Rewriting and Unwriting Perhaps you've heard this old joke. A visitor to New York once asked a musician for directions, inquiring, “Can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?” The answer came back: “Practice!” Whatever the art form, the development of...
The first time I sat down to hammer out a manuscript (a historical romance), I made a ton of rookie mistakes. One of the biggest was the endless parade of secondary characters I had strolling through the pages. Much of the action of the book took place at a country...
No one wants to read anything that looks like the terms of use for the average computer software. Why do we insist on writing like that? For example, here is an excerpt of the Terms of Use for the Waze app.* All words in this entire blog entry that are in boldface are...
Memoir Writing Tips Memoirs are deceptive. It seems like such an easy thing to tell people about your life. Just start at the beginning, right? No, don’t. Haven’t you ever been trapped in That conversation before? The one with the coworker or in-law or uncle? Or...
On a subject close to the heart (Light of My Life, or Fire of My Loins?) I explored the important distinction between erotic romance and erotica. Romance is a vast category and publishers of all shapes and sizes have whetstoned its various elements to fit within...
Romance is a vast category and publishers of all shapes and sizes have whetstoned its various elements to fit within multihued and varicolored categories, which means that…
Recently, I’ve been working with an author who has written a fantastic sci-fi novel but who has no writer’s platform to speak of. The only other things she’s had published are technical manuals, and she has no profile to speak of on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or any...
Character development is the driving force of any good story, and yet, this is one of the most misunderstood elements of fiction writing. We’ve all heard of “flat” or “two-dimensional” characters. But how do we avoid this fatal flaw?
Why Your Memoirs Are Important Memoirs have been created for millennia, even before humans knew how to write. After all, humans are tribal animals. In fact, experts in subjects ranging from dating behavior to corporate management look to evolutionary psychology - a...
When you think of erotica what comes to mind? Porn? Poetry? Fifty Shades of Grey? If you chose Fifty Shades, read on, for the book is categorized as erotic romance, not erotica. This is a crucial distinction to be made when a writer thinks of approaching the...
Marie Valentine Time and place are key pillars of your story structure. Without them, tales fall into fragments. Neglect setting at your own risk. Readers who don’t know where they are get frustrated, fast. You need to put the players someplace, otherwise the story will float out of control into the ether, as will your […]