Know when to step back from a story and take a break. If the words aren’t coming, that may be your brain’s way of telling you that you need to rest and recharge. Get up and walk around. Leave the house and get some fresh air. Go watch TV. Go …
This isn’t math class. You aren’t graded on procedure. All anyone cares about is the finished product. There is no editor/agent/publisher who is going to reject your work because you didn’t make an outline and then write your story from word one chapter one to the last word in the …
Backups are a MUST. I cannot say that enough. If you wrote it, if you LOVE it, if you don’t want to recreate it all again because it got deleted, then BACKUP YOUR WORK. Invest in an external harddrive. Use a file hosting site that you trust (and isn’t very …
Sometimes you get hung up on a sex scene or an action scene that keeps you from finishing the book. Don’t. Put in a placeholder, just like with the names mentioned in the previous post, and keep writing. Just make sure to go back to the placeholder later. The placeholder …
Romance is more than sex scenes but a bad sex scene can break a book. If you are determined to have sex scenes instead of closed door scenes and you need inspiration, you might want to do what I do — Watch porn. You don’t have to drop hundreds of …
The only way to become an author is to finish the story. You can have the greatest idea in the world but you need to get it written. Talking about writing isn’t writing. Reading about writing isn’t writing. Bragging about writing a book isn’t writing. WRITING IS WRITING. Finish the …
~ If you can’t think of a name for a character, use placeholders such as AAA and BBB and so on, moving down the alphabet for each character who lacks a name. When you finally think of a name for that character, you can use Find-and-Replace to switch out the …
