• Get ideas from you head onto paper
• Revisit an old favorite
• Go people watching
• BONUS: “Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have."
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Among the many character types to avoid when writing is the Mary Sue. This is an idealized character who stands in for the author as his idealized self.
This usually young and low-ranking character is flawless and always saves the day. Such a protagonist simply is unrealistic.
The Mary Sue character type arose from 1970s “Star Trek” fan fiction. The character was a female adolescent who was perfect at everything, was admired by the show’s Big Three of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, and who always resolved the story’s central problem. Though the original Mary Sue story satirized such unbelievable characters, it spawned several serious (albeit camp) fan fiction stories. Such characters usually marked a fan’s effort to live the fantasy of being in the “Star Trek” universe.
All great heroes – whether they be Odysseus or Captain Kirk, Luke Skywalker or Gilgamesh – display personal flaws and make mistakes. Though such characters represent cultural ideals of what we should strive to be, part of that lesson for readers involves the hero messing up and learning from it. Even comic book-styled heroes, such as the original Superman or the 1970s film versions of James Bond, made mistakes. If they hadn’t, the story’s climax would have come immediately after the central problem was introduced.
As Mary Sue can carry a negative connotation toward female protagonists, some literary critics and authors have taken to calling the male equivalent a Gary Stu or Larry Stu. Others use the gender-free Marty Stu, applicable to either sex. Variations of the term focus on specific skills that a young character excels at and so it dominates his/her personality – Einstein Sue for the genius, Jerk Sue for the short-tempered, Sympathetic Sue for the angst-ridden, and Mary Tzu for the tactically-inclined.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
“Sometimes I don't write for weeks. And then all of the sudden I'll get a rush of inspiration and you can't drag me away from my notebook. But I don't stress out if I don't hit some arbitrary word count each day or if I go a few days without writing something.” - Julie Ann Dawson
“It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.” - Steven Pressfield
“My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I’m sitting in front of a typewriter.” - Gary Reilly
“I couldn’t write. I grew tense. I was strangled by my own ego, by my petty desire for what I perceived to be the literary brass ring. I was missing the point, of course. The reward is in the doing.” - Dani Shapiro
“Writer’s block is when imaginary friends won’t talk to you. - Gary Lindberg
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
• Don't let fear hamper you: Dare to write
• Is bad writing space cramping your creativity?
• When solitary activity of writing is too isolating
• I can write anything I set my mind to
• How to stay focused on writing one book
• Don't let ergonomics issues stop your writing
• BONUS: “Writing stories is like making love.” - June Gillam
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
• Why you need to market your book
• Consider your concerns about book marketing
• Devise plan to market your self-published book
• Don't get hung up on watching book sales stats
• BONUS: "...the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.” - Samuel Johnson
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
No doubt about it, self-publishing is a formidable task – you’re editing, designing book covers, laying out the text in both paperback and multiple ebook formats, and marketing yourself. And that’s after you’ve actually written the book! Among the best aspects of self-publishing, however, is that you can learn how to do all of this without ever putting a mistake-ridden book before the public.
My advice is to begin by penning a short book of 8000-10,000 words (It can be as a simple as a couple of short stories appearing in the same volume.) that will be easy to handle and inexpensive to work on. This is your “tester book” that you’ll have professionally edited, that you’ll learn how to format, that you’ll write a back cover blurb for, that you’ll create a cover for, that you’ll upload to CreateSpace, and for which you’ll do everything else that needs to be done. Should you make a mistake – odd page numbers appear on the left-handed page, background photo swallows your lettering on the cover, misspellings appear on the Amazon.com page – you always can fix them until the tester book is perfect. After all, no self-published book actually goes before the public until you click the button approving it for sale.
This process is stress-free, as the tester book won’t be judged by others. It’ll also make self-publishing the novel you really want to sell easier to do and of higher quality. Think of it as a walk-through practice before the actual game. The bonus is when done when the tester book, you actually may want to release it!
You would upload it but not actually publish it. so, granted, you’re not fully learning marketing, but part of marketing is writing that back cover blurb and perhaps giving potential readers info about the status of your book via social media (esp. tweeting). The idea is to learn editing, formatting a paperback and an ebook, book cover design, creating an Amazon.com page, and uploading - and failure at any of those steps can sabotage your book no matter how much marketing you do.
Should you decide to publish your tester book, try just one of the formats (such as a Kindle ebook) and master that, then move on to other formats and start marketing. Of course, whenever you publish a book, you want to put it into as many formats as possible, but as this is just a tester book for learning the process – think of it as the sample question at the beginning of the SAT that you answer before actually doing the timed test – don't stress yourself by trying to do it all at once.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
• Accept vs. except
• Affect vs. effect
• Careless vs. care less
• Its vs. it's
• Sensuous vs. sensual
• There vs. their vs. they're
• Your vs. you're
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Man vs. nature
Your aging protagonists begins to suffer from a medical condition that usually only occurs in old age. As he enters a new chapter of his life, he develops deep bonds with new friends who come together solely because they share the same medical condition. How do they mutually address the laws of nature as combating this condition?
Man vs. man
Three siblings spend the summer caring for their remaining elderly parent, who is near death. What happens if a sibling discovers that one of them shares a deep, dark secret with the dying parent? How does this alter their relationships?
Man vs. society
How does a person come to terms with the different life that is experienced in old age despite that our entire society – from its values to its infrastructure – is geared to youthfulness? What conflicts occur between our aging protagonist who won’t accept her infirmities and society that expects she will be infirm in all ways?
Man vs. himself
What if a man realizes he is becoming senile? Between the ever more frequent disorienting lapses, he is able to piece together that he’s suffering a cognitive decline. How does he deal with this knowledge, and how does it affect his relationship with his self-identity?
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Among the big mistakes novice writers make is they don’t allow their protagonist to solve the story’s central problem.
A story always is structured around the main character overcoming some conflict that sets the tale in motion; this is the central problem. The bulk of the story focuses on how our hero attempts to resolve that problem and set the world right again. In the climax, he should do just that.
But what if instead of stopping the alien invasion, our protagonist serves merely a sidekick to a junior officer whose leadership and strategy achieves victory? What if instead of capturing the bank robber, another crook who wants revenge kills him rather than our police detective or Old West marshal taking him into custody? What if our heroine doesn’t find a way to work out differences with her beloved but instead his best friend talks him into setting aside his views so the two can be together forever?
Such endings are highly dissatisfying. Your readers have invested themselves emotionally in your protagonist, but these stories offer no payoff. It’s akin to a father who puts together a model that his son had bought and was excited to build on his own.
Never allow another character to do your protagonist’s work in the story’s climax. Even if the scene is tense and tightly written, you’ll undercut your readers’ trust in you as a writer.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
“As certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” - Nelson Algren
“Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration.” - Burton Rascoe
“We are writers – slightly neurotic and probably addicted to coffee, late nights, sunsets, laughter, tears, and heartache. Creativity is our drug.” - Steven James
“The job of the artist is to always deepen the mystery.” - Francis Bacon
“The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.