Some Great Writing Advice from Kristen Lamb’s Website

Early this morning, I was on a quest to refresh my mind as to essential elements for a Final Edit, needed for three of my WIPs before uploading.  Fate led me to Kristen Lamb’s site and I spent several hours reading selected posts at http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com.  What became pages and pages of gems saved in Word docx form, I distilled down to a single checklist below.  [The words in quotes are from Kristen (or later, Donald Maass); the others are my paraphrasing.]
 

IMO, here’s an author’s focused To Do list:

1. “To be successful, we have to write good books quickly.” 
2. “Balanced writers are happy and productive writers.” 
3. The best marketing is “1) good book and 2) word of mouth.” 
4. Write with passion and emotion. 
5.  Book purchases are emotionally driven. 
6.  Books are a high-consideration purchase because of the TIME and FOCUS needed to read a book.  (Hence #4 above, to write with passion/emotion.) 
7.  Novel Diagnostics.  Per Kristen, we start off our novel with our strength.  Beware if it is any of these:  a) info dump; fix with scene structure: goal -> conflict -> disaster; b) internalization; fix with conflict; c) flashback; fix with unique setting, authentic characters, captivating plot that unfolds in surprising ways, scads of conflict and more . . . “high human value,” high personal stakes as well as public stakes, plot layering and tension all the time. 
8. “Tension on every page” (per Donald Maass interview).  “[W]hat tension means: In dialogue, it means disagreement. In action, it means not physical business but the inner anxiety of the point-of-view character. In exposition, it means ideas in conflict and emotions at war.” 
9.  Villain/dark protagonist with humanity (per Donald Maass):  Show “a small act of compassion, humor, self-awareness.” 
10. Per Donald Maass: “Micro-tension all the time is what keeps readers turning the pages to see what will happen.”

Now, I’m off to review Margie Lawson’s Deep EDITs (trademarked) system and finish reading Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook.

Denise Barker, author + freelance copy editor + blogger

Good Ole Boys, a love story at http://amzn.to/GoodOleBoys

http://bit.ly/BNGoodOleBoys

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/168444 (Good Ole Boys)

http://amzn.to/CopyeditingChecklist

http://amzn.to/WordsRuleTheWorldQuotes

http://amzn.to/BeforeYouIndiePublish

http://amzn.to/QuitYourCurrentDayJob
http://amzn.to/HowToIndiePublish

My Midyear Resolution

I am an author with currently three nonfiction e-books offered via both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Yet I consider myself a novelist first.

So here is my July 5 midyear resolution.  I have two novels written to The End.  However, both need a deep-down final edit.  Courtesy of Margie Lawson's Deep EDITS (trademarked) system, I have about forty-two things to review in each book before either are uploaded for sale.  To accommodate all that, and wanting one novel available online by my birthday in November as my gift to myself, I chose the shorter story to do my first-ever Deep EDITS "practice" run. 

Since my selected novel is a little over two hundred pages and I have almost five full months until my self-imposed deadline, I have apportioned fifty pages to each of the first four months, with the fifth and final month for a final read-through and time set aside for choosing my cover art and uploading all.  That works out to approximately two pages a day for July through October.  That is doable.  Even with my crazy sixty-five-to-eighty-five-hour workweek, that is doable.  If I miss one day, no biggie.  I can allot four pages to the next day.  This is an armadillo I can chew bit by bit.

What midyear resolutions are you willing to commit to?