Writing Advice

Every week Voracious Readers Only sends out links to articles about writing, publishing, and marketing. I appreciate that effort. It's certainly not something they need to do.

When I'm in the mood I'll open their email and browse the various topics. Often, especially when I'm in the midst of writing, certain articles will catch my eye. "Ooh, I've been wanting to learn more about that!" 

Sadly, I'm usually disappointed. Columnists need to have their target reader in mind, and maybe these people do, but their target reader must be a writing novice. The advice is so basic, it's insulting. "The Eleven Parts of a Story". Well, there's the beginning, the end, of course, oh, and the middle. That's three. A few more listed were "characters" (really??), "plot", "conflict" ~ you get the drift. 

Another article discussed using blank space; what he termed "negative space". Essentially, it's creating a few carriage returns between story sections. No! Who the hell would have thought of that? I don't even have paragraphs! My stories are all one long run-on sentence!

It's like, "Writing For Third Graders". 

I have no idea how VRO scours the net for these articles; they seem to come from all over the place; but maybe they should take a gander at some of mine. I don't believe in talking down to people. I assume that if someone is reading my blog, they already have a good understanding of writing basics. 

I recently went into great detail regarding book cover design. I discussed every aspect that needs to go into creating a good cover. Some might consider that rudimentary, but it's all stuff I didn't know or think about the first few times I designed my own covers.

I've talked a lot about marketing; not just marketing in general, but specific sites that are good and sites that aren't. I provided real world results from using these services. 

This is the kind of detail I look for in an article. I don't need anyone to tell me that a story should have a beginning, middle, and end. I need examples that demonstrate the best way to do something. Those columnists' words are just air. They say nothing and use a lot of words with which to do it.

I'm going to try to include more actual advice in my posts, in addition to whining about my current book. It's in my nature to try to be useful.