Tag: book

The New Reality of Author Platforms

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[found on forbes.com; by Alan Rinzler]

“It’s still about visibility, but today’s approach has changed. The New Author Platform requires a focus on developing an unobstructed back and forth between authors and their readers, with the authors — not the publishers — controlling the flow.

Now it’s the author, not a publicist, who inspires readers to buy the book. The New Author Platform allows not only well-established authors, but unknown, first-time beginners to do an end run around the conservative gate-keepers and reach readers directly.”

To find out more from Alan Rinzler about author platforms, and how to create your own, click here.

[found on http://www.forbes.com/sites/booked/2011/07/26/the-new-author-platform-what-writers-need-to-know]

Writing Can Not Be Tone Deaf

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[found on writersdigest.com]

“If you find yourself having a difficult time sustaining one tone over a long work, try these three tricks.

1. Find a paragraph that sounds exactly the way you want to sound for this work, and tape it to your computer so that it’s always in front of you.

2. Each time you’re about to return to the piece, spend 20 minutes reading the work of an author who writes in the tone you’re after.

We’re natural mimics. You might try taking this a step further by more closely examining the sentence rhythms and word choices and looking for ways to make them your own. John Lukacs once said, “Style begins the way fashion begins: Somebody admires how the other man dresses and adapts it for himself.”

3. Starts and finishes are especially important to tone.

When revising your work, try moving some of your best sentences, the ones with energy and just the right tone, up to the top of your document: “I’m so looking forward to Christmas this year. It will be the only day in December not entirely consumed by children’s theater performances.” Could the piece begin this way? Experiment with moving equally strong sentences to the conclusion of your piece, for a cohesive ending.”

For more tips on writing from Writer’s Digest, click here.

[found on http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/3-tips-for-consistent-tone-2]

Sadness For Another Day

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[found on helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com; by ]

“Are sad stories with sad endings the domain of the lonely, the manic-depressive, and the masochistic?

…Take a moment to think about the stories that have changed your life. I’m willing to bet many of them were stories of pain, loss, sacrifice, and sin.

These are the stories that speak bluntly about hard subjects and force their characters—and their readers—to face hard truths and, hopefully, walk away from the realizations as someone slightly different and perhaps slightly better.

Few of us would want to subsist on a steady diet of tragedy, but all of us are better for having occasionally cleansed our reading palate with the astringent bite of these unflinching portrayals of bittersweet truth….

Sad stories don’t have to be depressing stories. The stories that have broken my heart and changed my life are stories of great tragedy, but they’re also stories of great hope. That, right there, is where we find the true power of the sad story—because light always shines brightest in the darkness.”

For more tips on writing from K.M. Weiland, click here.

[found on http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/2011/05/are-happy-endings-must.html]

Thriller, Horror, Terror — Oh My!

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[found on writersdigest.com]
“The three types of terror:
  • The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm.
  • The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one:
  • Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there …”
— Stephen King

“The horror genre is something that I’ve always been fascinated with. Luckily, I don’t think I’m the only one. People like to be frightened. If they didn’t, Stephen King wouldn’t have a thousand novels and you wouldn’t find every horror film ever made running on AMC at this time, every year. Seriously. Click over to AMC, I can almost guarantee Halloween, or one of its sequels, is on right now.

And horror has adapted. Yes, you can still find the slasher movies and those “gross-out” moments that King references. But it’s mental now. “Found footage” movies can be terrifying because it seems so normal, so everyday. The more real, the better. And the scarier. It’s the dark basement where the only thing you can hear is the beating of your own heart. That’s real horror. The kind of stuff that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, as if someone was standing inches behind you.

But writing horror isn’t so easy. With any type of fiction, it’s difficult to think of something that hasn’t already been done. With horror fiction, it’s especially true. Creepy basements, loud noises from the attic, hidden rooms, Indian burial grounds, old hotels, multiple personality disorder, etc.—it’s all been done before, and it’s all out there. These clichés shouldn’t restrain you, however. They’ve simply defined the space you’re working in. You know what’s there, now create your own story.”

For more tips from Writer’s Digest on writing thrillers, click here.

[found on http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/the-horror-genre-on-writing-horror-and-avoiding-cliches]

Make Stuff Up

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“I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.” 

― Neil Gaiman