Publishing Myths I Wish I’d Known | 10 Misconceptions About Writing and Selling Books

Which publishing myths cloud your vision? By “publishing myths” I mean misconceptions about the world of publishing today. To succeed as a writer, you must write a great book. To succeed as an author (meaning you intend to have a career writing more books) you must educate yourself about the marketplace of books. Publishing is an […]

Syntax and Sentences: How to Make Your Story Sing

by Marylee MacDonald in For Writers Doing Revisions

Syntax is the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences. The cumulative goal of sentences in fiction should be to please the reader’s inner ear. If you can improve your ability to shape sentences, your writing will be give readers greater pleasure. Why is that? Because readers “read” with an inner ear. The voice […]

Fine-Tune Your Storytelling Voice and Make Your Book Stand Out from the Crowd

by Marylee MacDonald in For Writers Doing Revisions

Finding the right storytelling voice has launched the career of many a novelist. In this post I’m going to talk about how to discover where your voice is strongest and how you can build from there. In a previous post, I provided a word cloud so that you could begin thinking about voice. Even with that […]