be the story

PersonalityPage, Character Traits for Writers

I frequently use PersonalityPage.com to assemble personality traits for characterization. The site is not organized for writers. In fact, the site navigation is poorly designed and pretty difficult to figure out. I had to poke around the site a bit to find the best pages there for characterization and how to use them. But having done so, I discovered that the content on those pages is perfect for writers trying to create characters. (Read more…)

Why I Don’t do 70 Days of Sweat (and other sprints)

70 Days of Sweat, Round 3 begins tomorrow. I will not be participating. Just as I participate in neither NaNoWriMo nor NaNoEdMo. Why not? What do I have against writers trying to write a book? Nothing, except…

In my view, either I’m a writer, and I write consistently. Or I’m not a writer, and I don’t. Therefore, churning out a novel before the end of the day May 10, that exercise does not make me a writer. Just a few hundred words each and every day, that does make me a writer. This misperception many writers and aspiring writers seem to have. It’s as if they think they need to push themselves to the limit in order to get enough time for writing, and that requires something like NaNoWriMo or 70 Days of Sweat.

Or else there’s some lure in the idea that, if you just buckle down and do it, you could actually write a novel in only a month (or 2½ months). I think that’s the wrong attitude to take. Rather, look at it this way: If you can spend just 10 or 20 minutes each day writing, you can finish a complete novel in under a year. That’s right, if you really want to be a writer, you don’t have to give up your life. You don’t have to “find time,” because you can probably find 10 or 20 minutes easily enough. (More on that in a sec.) (Read more…)

Sharing the Love with Holly Lisle Fans: Limited-time Free Offer

• Because Holly Lisle’s writing e-books have bailed me out more than once…
• Because Holly knows the value of paying forward…
• Because I want to follow in her footsteps…
• And because February is the month of Valentine’s Day…

If you’ve ever bought any of the electronic downloads from Holly Lisle’s online web shop, this limited-time freebie is available to you.

Click here to find out more.

-TimK

Discovering Character Secrets from Your Relatives!

Much of the time, we treat relatives as obligations: “Yeah, but what can you do? He’s family.”

This year, during the holiday break between December 25 and January 1, the kids and I and Grandma and Grampa piled into a rented minivan and trekked 7 hours to southern New Jersey… where the aunts and uncles and first and second cousins reside. And while I was there, I finally understood why Brothers and Sisters makes me laugh.

But the biggest epiphany I had… (Read more…)

The Most Important Story Element

In the beginning, I was a software developer, not a writer. And if you’ve read any open-source documentation, you know how badly software developers write. So you know how wide a chasm I had to jump if I wanted to learn how to write fiction.

The fiction bug first bit me in 2002, when I had an inspiration for an idea I wanted to write about, and I knew I had to explore the idea from within a story, because it was the only way to make the words personal, concrete, not just to explore an abstract idea. So I sat down to pen the great American novel… (Read more…)

How to Beat Writer’s Block: The Definitive Course

Today, Holly Lisle releases her definitive course, How to Beat Writer’s Block. But as an affiliate of Holly’s web store, I’m making a special offer available only to you and others who are reading this blog post.

For those who order Holly Lisle’s How to Beat Writer’s Block through my affiliate links at the bottom of this post, I’m offering two freebies of my own. (Read more…)

A Sure-Fire Cure for Writer’s Block

I got this from a copywriting maven… Sorry, I don’t remember who. Maybe it was Dan Kennedy. Or the late Gary Halbert. It might have been Gary Bencivenga. Sorry, I don’t remember. I heard it in an interview, and I’ve actually tried it, and it actually works for some types of writer’s block.

This is a simple one-step procedure you can use to barrel through those times when you just can’t get started. You know your characters and their story. You know what comes next. Everything is all set. But you’re not in flow, and the words just won’t come out.

What to do? Very simple: Just sit down to your word processor (or your pad and pencil), and start typing the following: (Read more…)

The Value of a Skillful Writer

A paragraph struck me while I was reading an open letter by Joss Whedon about the writers’ guild strike:

Writers can be replaced, as we are constantly reminded. But so can companies. Power is on the move, and though in this town it’s been hoarded by very few, there are other companies with newer ideas about how to make money off of – or possibly, wonderfully, with – the story-tellers.

It struck me how valuable good writers are and how much TV networks–and fans, too–undervalue them. Joss Whedon is an exception to the rule, because he actually has a fan-site. Most fans never truly appreciate how thoroughly they are indebted to the creators and writers of their favorite shows. (Read more…)

Is my story cliché and contrived?

An actual question asked on one of the writer’s boards. An aspiring author gave a two-paragraph summary of his plot idea. He said he feared it was just a series of clichés, then he asked whether it was too contrived to be taken seriously.

Now, I don’t know whether publishers would take it seriously. I can only speak as a writer and as a reader. (I have little faith in most publishers to do the right thing by readers, but that’s for another blog post.) But for what it’s worth, here’s my answer: (Read more…)

100 Free Fictional Character Ideas

… a tiny sample from 1001 Character Quirks for Writing Fiction. Literally, the full list is more than 10 times as big. Of course, the list of quirks is the easy part, because they’re just character ideas, and ideas are a dime a dozen.

-TimK (Read more…)