Category Archives: Writing

inspiration, marketing

Marketing isn’t just about selling books

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taken from Sheila’s talk in May 2014

Why should we care about marketing?

Quite a few people wanted a talk on marketing, but I’m guessing the rest of you might think, I don’t want to sell stuff, I’m just writing for me. Why do I care about marketing? But marketing isn’t just getting your book into stores and selling lots of copies. It’s also what you’re doing when:

  1. You tell your grandkids, “You should care about this; it’s your family history”
  2. You tell your spouse, “No, I’m not wasting my time”
  3. You tell yourself, “I know what I’m doing and I’m going to get this thing written.”

A marketing exercise for everyone Continue reading Marketing isn’t just about selling books →

exercise, plot, Writing

Plot a Mystery

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Plot a mystery

  1. Imagine you want to write a mystery. Who is your main character?
  2. Where is your main character?
  3. Your next nine answers should form a mystery story. At number one, how would you introduce the character and place?
  4. At number nine how would your story end? Does your MC ride off into the sunset, or jetski into space, or…?
  5. At number five, what crisis or mystery would you like your character to solve?
  6. At number seven, how would a second crisis grow from the first one, making it a mystery that really has to be solved?
  7. At three, how might your character end up in a place where he/she/it would encounter the mystery?
  8. At two, why would your character end up there?
  9. At four, give the character a need to care.
  10. At six, show how one crisis turned into another.
  11. And at eight, tell how the crisis was resolved by your character before the ending.
exercise, genre, Writing

Writing action scenes, from Sheila Deeth

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Writing Action Scenes

Sheila’s September 2013 talk and writing exercise were taken from a chapter in Writing Fantasy Heroes, edited by Jason M. Waltz

 

WRITING ACTION SCENES

Writers’ Workshop of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Seventh Star Press) may well be the better book, but a particular chapter in Writing Fantasy Heroes caught my eye. The chapter’s called Writing Cinematic Fight Scenes, by Brandon Sanderson, but the lessons apply to any action scene, and we all write action scenes sometimes, or else nothing happens.

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