Jami Gold's Blog: Jami Gold, Paranormal Author, page 34

Picking Editors: Can We Combine Steps (and Save Money)? — Guest: Lisa Poisso

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Once we’ve been writing for a while, we’ve heard enough about the process that we know our draft will be imperfect. (We still might not like that fact—or panic when our rough draft is less than awesome—but we “know” it on an intellectual level at least. *smile*) So it stands to reason that our draft needs editing to fix, strengthen, tighten, and improve our writing and our story.

Given that truth, and given that many authors choose to self...

Creating the Right Mindset to Be Productive — Guest: J. Rose

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Much of our success as authors depends on our mindset. If we’re not in the right mental place, we can struggle with the creativity needed to write, we can suffer from even the most well-intentioned feedback, and we can let obstacles of every type hold us back.

But changing our mindset isn’t easy. Just like our characters, we have reasons for the way we feel, and those reasons often don’t disappear on their own.

That’s why I’m so happy to w...

Don’t Let Impostor Syndrome Ruin Your Writing — Guest: Kassandra Lamb

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I’ve written before about impostor syndrome and how so many of us struggle with the fear of being a fraud. In that post, I shared several insights from Dr. Valerie Young’s presentation at the Romance Writers of America National Conference last year that I found helpful, such as:

Think about how we define competence, as that definition plays into when we think we’ll be “good enough.” Be aware of whether we internalize or externalize our st...

Deep POV and Hidden Messages in Subtext — Guest: Lisa Hall-Wilson

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We’ve talked many times here before about deep point of view (POV) and how relating the story from inside our character’s head can strengthen our writing. For example, deep POV can:

solve many of our craft issues, such as showing vs. telling smooth the insertion of our character’s thoughts evoke emotions in readers help us avoid information dumps make descriptions more active and vivid

Regular readers of my blog know that I’m also a big...

10 Ways to Make NaNoWriMo Work for You — Guest: Jenny Hansen

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Woo hoo! Who’s ready for NaNoWriMo tomorrow? Anyone? *crickets* Er, well, if you’re still unsure if you can make NaNo work for you, I have the perfect guest post for you today.

I’ve said before that I don’t worry about whether or not I “win” NaNo by writing 50K words during the month of November. For me, my goal is to use the camaraderie and encouragement to write more words than usual. Any words are better than no words, and any progress...

Writer Strengths: How Do You Persevere?

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Perseverance is an important trait among writers. The reasons why are obvious if we check out the definition:

“to persist…in spite of counterinfluences, opposition, or discouragement” (Merriam-Webster)

“continue in a course of action even in the face of difficulty or with little or no prospect of success” (Google)

“to persist in anything undertaken; maintain a purpose in spite of difficulty, obstacles, or discouragement; continue steadfast...

Want to Write with Diversity but Not Sure How? — Guest: Bran L. Ayres

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When we’re drafting a story, our brains often try to get away with being lazy because writing with purpose and voice and imagination is hard. That laziness can also lead us to rely on stereotypes, clichés, and tropes.

We can’t avoid stereotypes all the time—after all, we each embody at least one stereotypical aspect, so avoiding them entirely wouldn’t feel realistic. However, sometimes our lazy brains will feed us those clichés because the...

Showing vs. Telling: Finding the Right Balance

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Last time we talked about how we can figure out when to use showing or telling techniques in our writing. But even with that help, it’s not always easy to know how much showing or telling works best for our story.

Carradee, a regular commenter here, brought up some great examples of why the answer might not be as straightforward as we’d hope. So I want to dig a little deeper into some of the problems we might run into when trying to find t...

Showing vs. Telling: How Do We Choose?

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One of the most common pieces of writing advice is to Show, Don’t Tell. In many cases, that’s good advice, as our readers want to experience the story along with the characters. But as with most advice, that “rule” is imperfect and incomplete.

As I mentioned in my introduction to my WHW Writing Coach post about how to skip time in our stories:

Unless we’re writing a story in the include-every-minute mode of the TV show 24 (and even that sh...

How Do You Define Success?

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We all probably define success differently. Depending on our point in our publishing journey, we might focus on anything from words written or queries sent to books published or quitting our day job.

To some extent, there’s no wrong answer. Our definition is whatever works for us.

However, to reach our chosen success-goals, our goals also have to be realistic and within our control. So let’s walk through how we might define our success—as...