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Writing Techniques and Tips

Clever techniques to have you hitting your word count goals in no time.

Five great writing tips from J.K. Rowling

These days, J.K. Rowling is a household name all over the world – the first billionaire author on the planet and the creator of a world that many of us can't imagine life without. But how did unpublished writer Joanne Rowling turn into this superstar with film rights sold to Warner Bros as well?...

October 8th, 2012

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Great dialogue: 10 tips from movie dialogue pros

Great dialogue involves your reader or viewer in a conversation completely. Read 10 tips from movie dialogue pros, from Hitchcock to Mamet and others: 1. Make written dialogue visual like movie dialogue In beginners' dialogue, characters often read like floating talking heads in a void. Th...

October 11th, 2012

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Tips from the Masters: Lessons from Charles Dickens

Emulating Charles Dickens’s writing style has been attempted by many, and only partially achieved by few.  It is mostly known to be old-fashioned, outrageously imaginative, wordy and sentimental. His popularity is probably most attributed to the fact that he wrote in installments, keeping hi...

December 7th, 2012

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5 ways using morning pages will help you finish writing a book

'Morning pages' is a concept popularized in Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. Using morning pages is a system Cameron describes as something that will 'provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand'.  Here are 5 ways writing morning pages daily wil...

April 22nd, 2013

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Tips from Ernest Hemingway's short stories

In novels such as For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms and short stories including “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” American writer Ernest Hemingway explored such themes as restlessness, war, loss and death and became an enormous influence on...

April 2nd, 2013

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Who Chekhov was, and why modern writers should care

Anton Chekhov. The short story writer named by nearly every great Western twentieth century writer as a significant influence, who shaped the modern short story as we know it, was this nineteenth century Russian writer. Writers of every genre should be familiar with the work of Chekhov because o...

April 16th, 2013

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What is purple prose? Definition, examples and how to avoid

What is purple prose? It describes sentences that are too mannered and stylized. The Oxford English Dictionary defines purple prose as 'writing that is too elaborate or ornate'. How can you distinguish between good writing and purple prose? Read tips to avoid purple prose in your o...

April 11th, 2013

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Dan Brown: 10 tips for writing bestselling suspense

Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code among other books, is one of the top-selling authors of all time. What can aspiring authors learn from his success? Plagiarism scandals aside, Dan Brown's global publishing success garnered endless publicity. The linguist Geoffrey Pullum called Brown on...

July 31st, 2013

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Turning notes into a novel

Most writers don’t sit down on day one of novel-writing and begin spinning a tale; generally, they’ve been outlining and making notes for a while. Turning notes into a novel, a publishable manuscript, can seem daunting. Despite this, the tips below will help you develop your notes into a book. Ho...

August 1st, 2013

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Writing feedback: How to get helpful critiques

One of the challenges for us all as writers is getting good feedback on our writing, especially early in our career. You can get feedback for free or you can pay for it, and you can get it from peers or from professionals. To get feedback on your writing: Join an online writing group or foru...

September 23rd, 2013

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Understanding the snowflake method

There are nearly as many ways to approach writing a novel as there are writers, but many swear by an approach known as the snowflake method. Developed by writer Randy Ingermanson, the snowflake method can be particularly helpful to writers who prefer to plan extensively before setting out to wri...

February 3rd, 2014

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Creating mood like Haruki Murakami

Mood has a great deal to do with the success of a piece of fiction because it is related to how the story makes the reader feel. A writer aiming for a melancholy or surreal mood in fiction could study the novels of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami for tips on how to achieve those moods. Murakami...

February 17th, 2014

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