Writing help improve your writing by not writing

Every writer needs some help with their writing. Every writer can improve their writing. One simple technique you can use to improve your writing and better develop your writing process is to spend less time writing and more time thinking about your writing.

Many writers struggle with their early drafts simply because they have not allowed an idea enough time to simmer. Giving yourself time to brainstorm, sift and sort through ideas, and to both have and build upon creative inspirations is one of the keys to becoming a successful and productive writer.

It is best to work on this when you are away from your desk, your computer and any writing equipment (even something as simple as a paper and pencil) however that is the only rule about location. You can sit yourself on a park bench or in your car, you can take a walk or a jog, or you can perform some mindless household task such as vacuuming, folding clothes or washing dishes. There really are not rules as long as you can focus the majority of your brain power on your writing without the distractions of friends, family, or co-workers.

Even with today's hectic, busy days there are moments when we are alone with our thoughts and if you want to improve your writing then you should set aside at least a portion of those moments to focus on your writing. In fact, you might find that not only does this improve your work but it also allows you to multi-task by completing some other mundane task (or simply getting in your exercise for the day). I promise you that once you have focused your brain on your writing that you will see an increase in your productivity. You will actually spend less time in front of the computer (or notebook) but will deliver more quality writing in that shorter time.

It is important once you are set on a specific project that you focus your thoughts on that goal. If you are writing something short then focus first on the introduction, for example. If you are writing a novel or book then focus on one scene or section of a chapter. Create a movie in your head, and because it is your movie, do not overlook the sounds, smells, and textures that go along with it. Put yourself in the shoes of the characters of your movie so you can identify with them and feel their emotions. Play with words and sentences in your head. Get a feel for the rhythm of the language. Does it match the "movie" you created?

The more you work these elements over in your head then the easier it will be when you sit back down to write. Use your head to make writing easier for you and more effective as well.

The more time you spend thinking and planning your writing before you set out to work on your latest project the better.

Pahl receives bronte prize nomination

Writing on a small press, Nelson Pahl joined some of mainstream literature’s most famous names to become one of the five finalists for romantic fiction’s biggest award, the 2007 Bronte Prize. The accolade recognizes the best love story published in the U. S. and Canada annually.

Pahl’s Bee Balms & Burgundy, published on independent imprint Cafй Reverie Press, goes head to head for the coveted accolade against Nora Roberts’ Angels Fall (Putnam), Richard Paul Evans’ Finding Noel (Simon & Shuester), Roger Alan Skipper's Tear Down the Mountain (Soft Skull Press), and Water for Elephants (Algonquin Books) by Sara Gruen.

Bee Balms & Burgundy is the tale of Mia Lawson, a 30-year-old post-mastectomy breast cancer survivor who, in the aftermath of her diagnosis, realizes her lifelong love for childhood neighbor Nick May. Narrated by “Nicky,” the story takes the reader through Mia’s three dilemmas. First, how will she tell her childhood buddy of her feelings? Secondly, if he feels the same, how will she cross the necessary bridge to her first intimate encounter since her mastectomy? And thirdly, if all else works out, will she live long enough to savor it? The story is set between St. Paul, Minnesota and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Pahl's witty and articulate style, as well as his sense-teasing descriptive writing, have garnered him much critical acclaim in the independent literature realm. Indie Nation Magazine went so far as to bill him as "Indie Lit's Most Intriguing Writer" in their Autumn 2006 issue.

And at least one person feels Bee Balms & Burgundy is a sure winner.

"He's a better writer than anyone I've seen in a long time," says Jay Nelson, Cafe Reverie Press managing director. "He understands the rules, how to self edit and activate everything, how to get the most out of the least.

"And that story in particular is better than anything it's going up against. If he doesn't win, the jury doesn't know what they're doing. Bee Balms has it all."

The Bronte Prize winner will be announced March 15, 2007 on the organization’s Web site ( bronteprize. org). The victor receives $12,500 and the Bronte Prize trophy.

How to promote your books in online world

Now I assume that you had published you first book, and you want to promote it. These are many way you can use to promote books online.

1. Make use of your signature online. Make sure you put your link to where your book can be found or purchased in your signature. In your email, you can link to websites, blogs, or whatever you want. Don't make it too long, it'll annoy the readers. And another important point is to make a post to relevant groups or forums.

2. Google and Yahoo group are the best places to go. Join the groups that are for readers and post often. The other will see your site through your signature

3. Go to chat spot and start chatting, Offer them a gift or related promotional items to come to your sites ( That where the address of your book.) If the chat is somethings about writing, offer them a critique. That will make your book more interesting in their point of view, just remember, people always love critique.

4. Try finding a related websites or blogs that are in your genre, offer them to do a reviews or maybe a short interview on their site or blog. If the blog has a very high traffic, the more people will see your book. Follow the golden rules of selling online, "the more traffic, the more sales"

5. Put up your own website or blog. You will argue me with this. You might say that you don't want to afford the hosting or domain. I have to tell you that, your site or blog can be a huge different. Your book's site will add the book more value from the customers' eyes. What's more is that when you publish another book just simple put it there, where your promoted site is. That make your life a lot more easier because you have to promote once and for all.

6. Create a mailing list. That way you can interactive with your readers. You don't have to make a newsletter about your books or your goods. It'll scared the readers away. Try to make if fun and friendly, convince them that you are their's friend. The friend that introduces them a great books ( of yours, exactly) :)

7. In your blog (or your website, but I recommend you to setup it with Wordpress to use blog feature. It's very easy for you because you don't have to worry about on-page factor) try to write it as often as you can. If it possible, try to write it everyday, Visit other people blogs and don't forget to comment on their's blog. By doing this will keep him/her happy and the important thing is don't forget to link back to your blog for his/her comment.

8. After you have finished setup your site, try to exchange your link with your author friends or others. That will make your site more visible to a horde of internet users.

9. Every time you finish reading a book, try writing a review article of it. You can submit it else where. That will make you backlinks.

10. Join the internet contests. Usually, It's free. You don't worry about winning the first place. If you don't win, your title will be list anyway. So many more people are watching you!

Be friendly, Go everywhere and make friend. Be helpful to everybody. Giving your time. Pay respect to other and say them a congrats when they make a nice post or article. This is the most important thins I want to tell you above all. You will get help by many people, you'll be the inspiration of the other, they'll promote you without saying a word. Friendship rule the world :)

Short story ideas - how to have them

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Hopefully, when you want short story ideas, you don't sit there waiting for inspiration. It's better to write anything, and do it right now. English writer Graham Green attributes much of his success to a simple habit: He forced himself to write at least 500 words daily, whether he felt like it or not. Perhaps creative inspiration can strike at any time, but it strikes more often when there is work instead of waiting.

What do you write though? Here are a couple new ideas for generating new short story ideas.

Explain This

I once created a car travel game called "Explain This." Someone suggests an unusual scenario in a sentence or two, and then each player explains it in a plausible way. It's an entertaining way to pass the miles, but also a great way to come up with short story ideas.

Just start with an odd scene, anything that pops into your head. You might start, for example, with "Todd handed out the dollar bills to the people as they walked by, trying to distribute as many as he could quickly, before the police could stop him." Now explain that. Our minds insist on explaining things, so you'll find an explanation if you try. If it's interesting enough, you have your next short story.

As I look at the scene in my mind, I imagine the dollar bills are signed or otherwise identifiable, and they can be traded at a big seminar for a gift worth even more. A person could spend it and get a soda - or get something truly valuable for it. Maybe this will go in the marketing ideas file instead of the short story ideas file.

Maybe Todd is handing out the last of his money as per the instructions of his spiritual leader. Could it be a "get rich quick" cult that requires all members to start from zero? A religious movement based on getting rich? Someone could make it into a plausible story.

Short Story Ideas From Combining Stories

Here's a fun technique that is hopefully useful, but is at least worth a few laughs. Just combine old stories into new ones. The less similar the stories you start with, the better. The story of Adam and Eve combined with "I Robot," for example, could lead to an interesting new story. Maybe a pair of robots start a new world. "Original sin" might be the arising of their own consciousness, or their rejection of man as their master.

Hmm... "The Miracle Worker" and "Gorillas In The Mist?" Struggles of an ape that learns at last to speak and be independent? "Star Wars" and "Cool Hand Luke?" The story of a man who livens up the deathly atmosphere of a penal colony in space? "Frankenstein" and "Gone With The Wind?" The possibilities are endless. Start cranking out those new short story ideas.

Write about something that will change your life

It's been said that you should "write about what you know". It's also been said that doing that condemns you to a life of boredom as you'll never grow beyond your current limitations.

Not very helpful, is it?

It's also been said that you should write about what you're passionate about, interested in or otherwise taken by, as you'll spend so much time researching it, writing it and rewriting it, that it had better light your fire, or it will drive you insane. And then again, others say don't tackle a topic you know nothing about, you should write what you know....

And so we go around in ever decreasing circles.

I actually subscribe to the "write what you know" line of thought, but with a bit of a twist. I encourage writers to write about what they know on an emotional level.

Try writing a story that heals YOU. Emotions are the universal language. We all feel the same feelings, we may just experience them in different ways. We all recognize joy, love, peace, anger, resentment, jealousy and fear and when you tap into this universal language with your stories, you speak to the hearts of all readers. As you and your characters go on the roller coaster ride, your readers will go with you, and as you and your characters heal, so too will your readers see a way out for themselves.

Have you ever read a novel that's changed your way of looking at the world? I certainly have. Try this simple tip, and you'll soon be writing stories that change lives as well, including your own.

Write about something that will change your life.

Now by this I don't mean sitting back and thinking, "What would change my life? I know! Divorcing my wife/leaving my job/selling my business and trekking across Africa/buying a ski lodge in Switzerland/running for President". That's not the type of change I'm talking about.

I'm talking about real change - the type of change that starts on the inside and works its way out. And while it may eventually manifest in divorce, resignation, liquidation, traveling, new businesses or political aspirations, it is not the way the change looks on the outside that matters as much as how it looks on the inside. And once you get the inside right, the outside takes care of itself.

As writers of fiction we are constantly living inside our own imaginations, aren't we? True creativity occurs when experience meets imagination. The best way to write stories that resonate with others, that capture them from the first page and don't let them go until the last, is for you, as the writer, to delve into your own basement of emotional experience and retrieve images of universal resonance to deliver to your readers.

JK Rowling said that the Dementors were definitely born of her own depression. The mirror of Erised was her own desperate desire to spend just five more minutes with her own mother, who passed away as she wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Harry's search for a family of his own was paralleled by Jo Rowling's desire for the very same thing in her own life.

You need courage to be a fiction writer. Courage to expose your own wounds, courage to go to the places you haven't been before to heal them, and courage to decide you have the strength to go on the journey in the first place.

We have all had our ups and downs in life. And saved somewhere in our unconscious databases, are all the emotions, all the traumas, all the joys and all the images of our lives. As you access these buried emotions, a curious thing will happen. You won't necessarily relive the actual events that happened to you. By drawing on the emotion, and allowing it to be your guide, your imagination will fill in the missing bits, and you'll find yourself retrieving images, scenes and situations that may be very different to your own actual experience. Writing a memoir or autobiography is not the goal. Writing a story with emotional resonance that others will want to read is.

Try this simple exercise: Sit with your feet flat on the floor, hands resting on your thighs, your eyes closed. Take 3 to 5 deep breaths. Now in your mind's eye, see a spotlight shining on a brightly lit stage. Step into the spotlight. Take a few seconds to grow accustomed to the shift in perspective. Now I want you to feel real anger. Feel the heat of it coursing through your body. How dare they? What right do they have? Ask yourself these questions over and over in your mind until you have worked yourself up into a white heat of fury. Now in your mind's eye, allow an image to form around you, the source of your anger. What's happening? Who is there? What can you hear? Coming up with a first sentence, write for 10 minutes on what happens next.

When you've completed this exercise, take a break, or come back tomorrow and try this next exercise. Following exactly the same process, feel forgiveness instead of anger. Allow the sense of true forgiveness to envelope you. Then when you are ready, allow an image to rise in your mind's eye, and coming up with a first sentence, write for 10 minutes.

Did these two pieces of writing connect at all? Did the forgiveness relate to the anger, or vice versa? Don't worry if they didn't. Just know that as you utilize this process when writing a story, you will write a progressive story of great emotional resonance, and in so doing, you will be unconsciously training yourself to experience this journey in your own life.

This is a simple exercise to show you the power of accessing your unconscious through emotion. Once you become accustomed to using this method, you will find all kinds of magical thing occurring to your writing, and all kinds of wonderful healing occurring in your own life.

Writers of non-fiction are bound to an extent by the limitations of science and provable fact. They can speculate, philosophize and hypothesize, but until someone can come up with "proof in a test tube", it is essentially speculation.

When you write a story, with a character confronting their issues, overcoming their obstacles, facing their demons and changing their lives, you are unconsciously writing a guidebook that shows others how to make those changes too. Fiction writers offer real solutions. Real emotional solutions. We may not show you how to fly to the moon, or how to crack the property market and walk off with millions, or how to build a successful e-commerce business from home, but we can show you how to really live your life, how to relate to others, how to relate to yourself, how to heal relationships and how to lead more blissful lives.

And that's pretty terrific, don't you think?

What is freelance copy editing

People interested in other freelance writing careers usually look upon copy editing with disdain. Copy editing doesn't involve attention to the actual structure of a piece, they say, and involves little research and fact-chasing necessary to create a lively, memorable article or story. However, copy editing carries its own unique challenges; such as:

1) you need to pay careful attention to the basic mechanics of writing; and

2) you need to pay attention to accuracy, both in facts and in language.

Freelance copy editing isn't just a simpler offshoot of freelance writing in general, but an important discipline in its own right -- and a rewarding one.

To become a successful copy editor you need to know how to use style guides. With some exceptions, editors of newspapers, magazines, and other print publications require you to write in a homogeneous style, both to compensate for writers with occasionally sloppy spelling and usage and to ensure consistent terminology over time. (This is important with newspapers: the names of foreign leaders, organizations, and other foreign-language nouns are often subject to variant spellings.)

The most commonly used style guides include AP (Associated Press), MLA (Modern Language Association), and Chicago. Any budding freelance copy editor would do well to own a copy of each of these, and to become familiar with their use before applying for jobs. Prospective employers will not hire copy editors who lack knowledge of style guides. Use a product like StyleEase software to help with style.

Fact checking is another prime skill for copy editors, as it is a publication's first line of defense against accusations of libel or misrepresentation. Fact-checking is a simple procedure: call the author of the article, ask for his or her sources, and, if warranted, call the sources directly to confirm quotes or statistics. Different publications will have different procedures for fact-checking, all of which should be explained when you take a job.

Beyond that, all that it takes to become a successful copy editor is a sensitivity to cumbersome phrasing, grammar, and spelling, as well as a sensitivity to an author's personal style. Many novice copy editors take a far too forceful approach to their work, effectively rewriting a reporter or other writer's article for them in line with style guides and their own ideas about what makes good writing. This isn't the function of a copy editor. Yes, clarity, grammar, and other issues with writing mechanics are all important, but a writer's ego is important as well, and a too-free hand in the editing process can alienate a publication's staff reporters and foster general enmity.

Since rewriting someone's article causes you more additional work as well, why would you want to do it? Instead, just try to achieve sufficient clarity while leaving as much of the original article "as-is" as you can. If there are any substantial portions of text that inhibit clarity or exhibit serious mechanical errors, talk to the writer personally before making any changes. Yes, it’s an extra step, but one that ensures professional respect in the workplace.

If you don't want to work for a publication, there are plenty of opportunities available for freelance copy editing, both for corporations and for private individuals. Educational publications, in particular, are always looking for good copy editors, and book publishers and literary journals always have a few spots available. You can find out about these opportunities through classified ads, or by making inquiries directly to the company. There's typically a lot of competition in these sorts of jobs, so a solid interview technique and some excellent samples are mandatory for securing work. Once you have your foot in the door, though, corporate copy editing can provide a stable -- if occasionally dull -- source of income.

Copy editing projects offered by individuals are another option, and one which can bring you a more varied body of work and a much more informal attitude toward style guides and format restriction. But this option carries with it some heavy caveats. Often, copy editing projects given by individuals amount to ghostwriting without appropriate compensation, and pay rates can be sketchy as well, ranging from low to nonexistent (with a promise of "resume experience," maybe.) Although when work is consistent, low pay isn't necessarily a problem, individuals can rarely guarantee a sufficient volume of work to ensure your livelihood and a decent career.

Before you accept individual copy editing projects, make sure that you know how much you'll need to make per hour to make the project financially worthwhile (as well as an estimate on how many hours the project will take), and don't accept less than that hourly rate. You may get less work with this approach, but clients won’t rip you off either -- an important consideration for professional copy editors.

Copy editing is a good, low-stress writing job, enjoyable on its own merits or as practice for other freelance writing goals down the line. You can succeed as a freelance copy editor if you familiarize yourself with style guides, and have a good grasp of grammar, spelling, and style usage.

How to write a better memo

Size doesn’t matter. Such is the case with the memo. Isn’t it amazing how one relatively short document can be such a huge pain? Memos are an overlooked office document. We assume the least amount of words on a sheet of paper makes it least important. How wrong we are. Memos are as important as a ten-page business letter autographed by Brad Pitt. A poorly written memo can be irritating to readers (who really just want to get back to work) and damaging to the sender (who has no idea how he or she managed to come off sounding so careless). Learning to write concise and effective memos is a skill vital to any business person. The following tips show you how to construct a formidable, readable memo.

BE SHORT, BUT SWEET

The most common problem with memos is their length. Regardless of the topic, a memo should never be more than two pages; any longer and the memo begins to ramble on like a report. Unless you’re reprimanding every person in the department, there’s no reason to be aggressive or rude. Keep it short, be polite and get to the point as quickly as possible.

STAY AWAY FROM THE CLICHЙ

Overused phrases like “We’re sorry for the inconvenience...” and “Please don’t hesitate to contact us...” aren’t just clichй, they’re vaguely heartless. Using such trite phrases shows your readers that you simply don’t care enough to phrase it differently or be remotely personal. Try “We’re sorry about this...” or “Give me a call...” instead. Remember, you know these people -- act like it!

MAKE THE POINT IMMEDIATELY

Instead of discussing a problem at length before ending with a vague conclusion as to what you need from the reader, get to the point in the first sentence. Your readers will be more likely to keep reading if they already know what you’re asking of them.

FOCUS ON THE PEOPLE

Avoid using passive verbs; and avoid sentences that rarely include a pronoun. Keep your memo focused on both the reader and yourself by using I, you, we and our often. It’s far more direct and personal and makes the reader feel as if you’re with them, not preaching at them.

KEEP IT CONVERSATIONAL

Strive to write as you talk, or at least as closely as possible. Use short sentences, familiar words and contractions. Try reading your memo out loud after writing; does it sound like you? Would you actually say these things? If not, revise until you’ve got the closest approximation. Never distance yourself from the reader with wordy sentences.

MAKE YOUR NEEDS SPECIFIC

What do you need from the reader? When and how do you need it? Make sure to close your memo with a summary of the points, but also be as specific as possible about what exactly you want; never leave the reader guessing. If you need a response via email by 2pm, say just that. Be as polite as possible here; nothing turns off a reader more than being yelled at for a response.