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Writing





Check out Write Great Fiction ...
Famous Authors' Writing Tips

Mark Twain Tells us How to Write
Mark Twain's 10 Writing Tips
William Shakespeare
George Orwell
Stephen King
Joseph Finder
John Steinbeck
Raymond Chandler
Elmore Leonard
Jennifer Cody Epstein
Lawrence Block
Kurt Vonnegut
Ernest Hemingway
Henry Miller
James Best
A Writing Cheat Sheet
Writing Tools of Famous Authors
Bad Writing Advice From Famous Authors
Buzz Feed' s Collection of 30 Writing Tips

Inspiration and Preparation
“How do you write a book?”
Basic Training-- Learning to Write Professionally
Basic Writing Tools

 Editing, Grammar, and Other Tough Stuff
Polish Your Manuscript
Word Crimes
Can a manuscript ever be perfect?
Finished Draft ... an Oxymoron?
Fear and the Bleeding Manuscript
Continuity, Clarity, and Crispness
Word-of-Mouth is Still King
I Hate Punctuation
The Evolution of a Novel
A Rude Awakening
5 Worst Typos Ever
How Literature Works

 Characterization
Characters Matter—Part 1
Characters Matter—Part 2
Characters Matter—Part 3
Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Hercule Poirot, and Harry Potter
Are Heroes a Fantasy?
Opposites Attract ... readers, viewers, and fans
Create Interesting Villains
Hero or Villain?
Heroes and Villains—Part 1: Heroes Need an Antagonist
Heroes and Villains—Part 2: Bad Guys Don't Need to be Human
Heroes and Villains—Part 3:  Machine That Want to Kill
Heroes and Villains—Part 4: Depraved Villains
Heroes and Villains—Part 5: Stories of Gut-Wrenching Endurance
Heroes and Villains—Part 6: Resolution with Redemption
The Most Divisive Characters in Literary History
I beg to disagree
Should a Writer Use Friends as Characters?

Dialogue
The secret to great dialogue
Talk is not cheap!
Did pirates say “Arrrr, Matey?”

Description
How not to bore your readers

Point of View
Why are murder mysteries written in the first person?
How do you decide between First and Third Person
It all depends on how you look at it—Point of View

Style and Voice
Finding Your Voice
Opening Lines to a Novel
Really Bad Opening Lines to Novels
Too Much Information
What am I writing?
Fiction: art or craft?
Touchy, Touchy, Touchy
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

Storytelling
Another Time, Another Place, Another story
Storytellers fix an unruly world
How about a free vacation?
Storytelling made dead simple
The art of the short story
Would You Care for a Slice?
9 Golden rules for the Road Runner and Coyote
Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling
Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park Talk About Storytelling
Story Arcs in a Book Series

Structure and Pacing
Outline a Novel?
A great first sentence does not a page-turner make
Opening a story—First, grab their attention
Speed Demons and Slowpokes

Revision and rewriting
Time, the Magic Elixir—Set Your Novel Aside for a Spell

Book Design
Cover Up!
Vintage Photograph to Western Book Cover
Do readers judge a book by its title?
New Cover for The Shut Mouth Society
The Evolution of a Book Cover

Research
Did McDonalds Invent Fast Food?
Finding the Past
Damn Research Anyway
The Real Wild  West
Did Abraham Lincoln say “That’s cool!”
Historical Fiction—Doing it Right
Guns and Horses: Getting it Right
The Wild West—an Escape from Dispair
A Fun Night in Virginia City
Carson City and the Landmark St. Charles Hotel
The Internet is right ... except when it is wrong

Television and Film
What Makes a Good TV Series?
And now starring ...
Writers in Hollywood ... Has anything changed?
Hollywood Celebrates the Anti-Hero
WSJ Editorializes on Hollywood Malaise