Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Wednesday's Links to Writing & Marketing Blog Posts


By: S. Jae-Jones

Where do you get your ideas from? is a question writers commonly receive, and is probably one of the hardest ones to answer. Part of that is because the Idea Generation process is different from writer to writer, and part of it is because many of us simply don’t know. We might as well say we get our ideas from IDËA, the Scandinavian idea superstore. Makes as much sense as anything else we might say.

However, speaking with other writers over the course of the past few months, I’ve noticed that many of us don’t lack for ideas; we just don’t know how to turn those ideas into novels. This is something I’ve struggled with on a current work-in-progress: I’ve had ideas about this book for years (eight years and eight completely rewritten drafts, to be precise), but it wasn’t until a few months ago that I finally figured out how to wrangle the Idea into an actual Novel.

When I look back at all the books I’ve written (finished, that is), I tried to pick apart why I managed to reach the end of this particular story when that one was an abject failure. Because I like programs and formulas and systems-building (even though I hate math), I managed to distill Idea Generation into three components.

Characters, Premise, Plot.

Sounds pretty simple, of course. All books have these three components, but identifying these components is sometimes harder than you think. (Or it was for me, anyway.) If your novel has two of these three components, then the odds of you being able to finish writing it are pretty high. However, if your novel has only one of them, then you’ll probably find yourself floundering somewhere in the dreaded “sagging middle”.

First, some definitions:

. . .

Read the full article HERE!
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If you missed my writing & marketing tweets and retweets yesterday, here they are again:
  1. How Much Should Authors Interact with Readers? | Official Author Website of Melissa McPhail http://ow.ly/JB7ls
  2. What Scares You about Writing or Publishing? | Jami Gold, Paranormal Author http://ow.ly/JB7Dr
  3. Author v. Them: When to Revise for Critiquers http://ow.ly/JBZwD
  4. 5 Facts About Your Book’s Ranking on Amazon | Savvy Book Writers http://ow.ly/JC0ow
  5. Anne R. Allen's Blog: Should You "Send Out" that First Novel? 9 Things to Consider First http://ow.ly/JC0uP
  6. The Big Idea: How to Find the Right Idea to Turn into a Book http://ow.ly/JC0yl
  7. Fiction University: Getting the Best Response From Your Characters http://ow.ly/JC0J1
  8. Bang2Write | 33 Experts Share What They Want Next From Female Characters http://ow.ly/JC13n
  9. The Art of Writing is Rewriting: How To Be Your Own Editor SFWC15 | Or So It Seems… ™ http://ow.ly/JC184
  10. How Authors Can Use Listmania to Promote Their Book | Selling Books http://ow.ly/JC1fb
  11. Book Machine: Time to bury the ISBN? http://ow.ly/JCanc
  12. Women in publishing -- achievements and challenges | The Bookseller http://ow.ly/JCaw9
  13. Creating An Author Business Plan: Setting Your Goals - Marcy Kennedy http://ow.ly/JCaC5
  14. Writability: How to Import Word Comments into Scrivener http://ow.ly/JCaH1
  15. How To Publish A Book Bundle On Kindle http://ow.ly/JCaKv
  16. The Kind of Platform You Should Be Building http://ow.ly/JCaTX
  17. The Book Designer — Practical Advice to Help Self-Publishers Build Better Books http://ow.ly/JCaZj
Happy writing and running, Kathy

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