Writing Tips: 5 Tips for Building a Page-Turner Recently I was a panelist at a conference for writers and readers. The four authors on stage were supposed to share, with a hotel conference room full of fans and aspiring writers, tips for keeping readers turning the pages. How does an author construct a plot […]
Category Archives: Writing Tips
Can you manipulate your audience to avoid being branded?
Can you manipulate your audience to avoid being branded? I never felt a thing. No branding iron sat in the campfire at the ranch until it was red-hot, and no screams came from me as my flesh sizzled. But I was branded. And I still am. I came to writing thrillers after many years […]
How to be a Writer: The Steps for Success
How to be a Writer: The Steps for Success Step One: Be a reader. Every writer starts out that way. Chances are, we fell in love with books before we even knew what to call them. Our parents and caregivers and teachers read to us, and we were transported. My father read us The Watchbirds […]
10 Questions to Ask Your Characters While Writing Your First Draft
10 Questions to Ask Your Characters While Writing Your First Draft Writing a first draft is a little bit like dating. You’re testing the waters with your newly created characters. You’re teasing out bits of their personalities to get a better grasp on what makes them tick and whether you want to spend months or […]
KARIN SLAUGHTER’S KILLER WRITING TIPS
KARIN SLAUGHTER’S KILLER WRITING TIPS Find an isolated place: a quiet room, the Georgia Mountains, your closet, wherever. Sequester yourself for weeks at a time. Write until you’re exhausted and hallucinating. Sleep for a few hours. Then do it again. Ignore your adorable cats. Sit down at your computer to just start writing already! […]
Nine things I’ve learned writing a first draft
Nine things I’ve learned writing a first draft 1) Beginning is really hard – It’s always daunting to open up a blank page. It always feels insurmountable to turning nothing into an 85,000-word novel, but just writing 500 words a day makes a first draft in less than six months. I know that the […]
Where do you get your ideas from, Mr. Preston
Where do you get your ideas from, Mr. Preston The most difficult question a writer is asked is this: Where do you get your ideas? It is by and large unanswerable, as the ideas seem to come unbidden and unlooked for out of some dark and mysterious inglenook of the mind. But in the […]
Eight Great Books About Writing
My 8 Favorite Books on Writing Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain It was written all the way back in 1974, but this is my favorite book on the list. So much good advice in here, but the best is: Move a story along quickly by making sure you have two […]
The Best Writing Advice I Ever Received…
The Best Writing Advice I Ever Received… The best piece of advice I ever received as an author was: You have the power to change it. I’m going back a few years now, but it made me realize the words I’d sweated over, though possibly written in blood, weren’t cast in stone. I could reel […]
Writing Suspense Like Alfred Hitchcock
Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author, Tony Lee Moral, offers some advice for aspiring suspense writers as he breaks down a few key techniques for writing suspense like Alfred Hitchcock. What suspense techniques did Hitchcock use that are applicable for fiction writers? Hitchcock gave the audience more information than the character to […]
Can Good Writing Be Taught?
To celebrate the release of her newest novel, Last Night, Karen Ellis reflects on what makes great fiction writing and how to discover and unleash the voice within. It’s an old question and generally the answer is “No.” And yet I’ve been teaching creative writing for twenty-five years—teaching, or leading, workshops in basic fiction writing, suspense, […]
A True Event Can Make Riveting Fiction
A True Event Can Make Riveting Fiction Glen David Gold’s novel Carter Beats the Devil (2001) opens with President Warren G. Harding gamely getting up on stage in a San Francisco theater to participate in a conjuring trick. Hours later, he’s dead. Were the two events connected? Suddenly the conjurer—the real-life Joseph Carter, a household name in […]