Tag Archive - writing advice

5 Things an Editing Tool Taught Me That Might Help You

March 9, 2017 in Writing for Life with 23 Comments

Today’s guest post is by Kathy Edens.

I spent four years in college working hard to achieve my bachelor’s in professional writing. I say this humbly because it’s certainly no great feat. In fact, using an editing tool for the past year has taught me things about my writing I didn’t learn in four years of college.

If you haven’t tried one out yet, an editing tool like ProWritingAid uses computer algorithms to compare your writing to hundreds of thousands of examples of published writing by great writers and authors. It then suggests ways you can make your writing more readable, and points out technical edits for stronger, more concise writing.

Its strength isn’t in finding grammar errors (though it does that too); rather, it’s in picking out those sentence structures or word choices that make your writing sound awkward or clunky. Continue Reading…

5 Strategies to Help Writers Get the Writing Done

December 8, 2016 in Throwback Thursday, Writing for Life with 3 Comments

For this week’s Throwback Thursday, we’re looking at an excerpt from a previous post titled How to be a First-Time Novelist (without Going Insane) by Jenny Bravo.

When I first decided to tackle English as a major, I was starry-eyed and hopeful, thinking to myself, “I’m going to write a novel; I just know it.” I loved my classes, adored my teachers, and lived in a collegiate bubble where everyone had potential. For every bad critique, a good one followed close behind. No writer was left behind.

Sound familiar?

Now, almost a year out of graduation, I’m living in a new, less structured writer bubble. It’s called “The First Time Novelist” bubble. There are days when I feel I have it all together, when the writing flows and I think to myself, “This is too easy.” Then there are days when I sit in front of the computer screen, staring at the keyboard with nothing in my brain but a recap of last night’s New Girl. Continue Reading…

3 Wonderful Things That Come with Getting Published

December 1, 2016 in Throwback Thursday with 1 Comment

For this week’s Throwback Thursday, we’re looking at an excerpt from a previous post titled A Few Cool Doors That Open When You’re Published by author and screenwriter Harrison Demchick.

It’s a long, long road to publication, as months or years of writing give way to months of editing, and then more editing, and then more editing. But you’ve arrived at that very best version of your story. You’re proud of it, and you should be. And once you launch it on Amazon, or your publisher launches it into the world, there will be nothing between you and superstardom. Right?

Yeah. Not so much.

No Guarantees

Writers who follow the publishing industry already know full well that creative success and commercial success have, at best, a complicated relationship, and even the most carefully considered marketing plans include no guarantees. When my novel, The Listeners, launched in late 2012, I knew from my own seven years in publishing that the top of the New York Times bestseller list was pretty unlikely, and I was going to have to fight like hell even to make anyone aware of my book. After all, a million new books are published every year. Continue Reading…

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