Category Archives: Writing

Thoughts, tips and articles on writing.

When to Write

If possible, and it isn’t always, try to write in your optimal time. In my case, that’s first thing in the morning. Luckily, I can shift my hours around and start work around 9 or 10 on most days. I plan on doing that. I also can get up at 5 in the morning and […]

November 5, 2008 – 5:56 pm | By KatherineWriting | Posted in Writing | Comments (0)

Techniques of the Selling Writer

Dwight V. Swain is the author of Techniques of the Selling Writer, a remarkable book on novel writing in that it breaks down the novel into small, easily-understood and well-explained pieces. These pieces and their structure, if well applied, will lead to a gripping tale that is difficult to put down. Here is my mindmapped […]

October 31, 2008 – 6:38 am | By NewMexicoKid | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Using freemind to plan your novel

In the 2007 NaNoWriMo forums, I wrote a post about how I used Freemind to plot my novel. Unfortunately, NaNo forum posts go away each year (it doesn’t look like they are archiving the sites anymore). Fortunately, tonight is the last night before they wipe the databases and I have pulled out the essence of […]

September 20, 2008 – 6:23 pm | By NewMexicoKid | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Liquid Story Binder Free TODAY ONLY

It was posted just today that giveawayoftheday.com is giving away free copies of Liquid Story Binder XE that normally costs ~$50 to activate. This is novel-writing software. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like it has some nice features. NOTE: You must download and install it TODAY (14 October 2007) to get the […]

October 14, 2007 – 9:33 am | By NewMexicoKid | Posted in Writing | Comments (1)

Oct 9 Pre-Planning Meeting Notes

Pre-Pre-Planning Exercise: There were a number of us last night who were more than 15 minutes early, so our ever-diligent ML Tim gave us notebooks and had us write a one page impromptu short story starting with the line: If it hadn’t happened to me, I would never have believed it. We then shared them […]

October 10, 2007 – 1:48 pm | By tinygreyhound | Posted in NaNoWriMo, NaperWriMo, Writing | Comments (1)

Write what you love

Waaay back in the day, I took a college English course on Romance Novels. (I love a good romance novel.) One of our assignments was to write a chapter of a romance in a particular style. I wrote a chapter of a Harlequin style contemporary romance. I struggled. A lot. I got a pretty crummy […]

September 27, 2007 – 4:24 pm | By tinygreyhound | Posted in Writing | Comments (3)

Using Emotional Response for Plot

October is swiftly approaching and my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel idea still lacks most of its plot. What am I to do? Well, this is one starting point (click on the image to jump to the full diagram): I decided to use Freemind in a brainstorming exercise and I thought about memorable novels and the key […]

September 27, 2007 – 6:32 am | By NewMexicoKid | Posted in Writing | Comments (0)