Jami Gold's Blog: Jami Gold, Paranormal Author, page 40

Genre Reading: Is “Escapism” a Bad Thing?

Coming up this weekend is World Book Day, a worldwide celebration of authors, books, and reading. Amazon even sent out an email to many of their customers, asking people to share their #LovetoRead moments on social media.

Reading is always a great thing to celebrate, but as we’ve covered before, certain types of reading can be valued more than others. However, assigning value judgments to the labels of “literary” and “genre” doesn’t make sense because preferences are subjective opinions. The...

Protagonist Boot Camp: Characters Who Drive a Story

In some circles, there’s a debate over identifying the protagonist in certain stories, such as The Great Gatsby. Is Nick Carraway the protagonist because he’s the narrator and every aspect of the story reflects his point of view? Or is Jay Gatsby the protagonist because he drives the events of the story (leaving Nick as simply the observant vehicle for the tale)?

We won’t delve into that debate here. *smile* But by default, the protagonist is defined as the main character, the hero, the lead...

Writing Habits: We Can’t Fix What We Don’t See

Virtually every advice program to change our behavior starts with the same step: recognizing our habits. Sometimes that edict is worded as “admit you have a problem,” and sometimes we’re supposed to reach out to others for insights.

Regardless, all advice along those lines comes down to one thing: We can’t fix what we don’t see, know, or understand.

We encounter this problem in all aspects of our life. Those of you who follow my blog regularly might have heard me talk about how I’ve been str...

Self Publishing? Match Your Plans to Your Goals — Part Three

After a one-month break for my health issues and to let Janice run her fantastic, month-long Revision Workshop on her blog, it’s time once again for my monthly guest post over at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. If you haven’t been following along, my series about Indie Publishing Paths at Fiction University has highlighted some of the choices we have to make as self-published authors and also given us a few guidelines.

We first discussed how we need to know our goals because that will hel...

Creating a Strong Moral Premise for Our Story — Guest: Jeff Lyons

A character’s arc—like all types of arcs—involves change, but what exactly is changing? Sure, a character could go from unsafe to safe, or not in a relationship to in a relationship, but that’s not about them changing—only their situation.

When a character changes—and learns a lesson along the way—readers sense more depth from a story. As a bonus, readers might learn something from that lesson as well. *smile*

We’ve talked before about how characters can suffer from a false belief—something...

Author Struggles: Gaining Reviews

There’s no end to the struggles we face as a writer and author. We struggle to learn all the aspects of craft, we struggle with self-doubt, and we struggle to get published. One other struggle we’ll likely deal with sometime during our writing career is gathering reviews for our books.

In the old days, a review of our book might have been simply an ego-thing, proof that someone read our story. Now, however, with Amazon’s algorithms, the quality, quantity, and recency of reviews can affect wh...

What’s “High Concept” & How Can I Create It? — Guest: Jeff Lyons

Last week, Jeff Lyons shared his insights with us into how to make every story idea the best it can be. Whether our story idea is for a meaningful story or an entertaining situation, he offered tips on how to strengthen our concept.

This week he’s back with another detailed post. Yay!

Today he’s delving into the tricky description of high concept. Many agents and editors say they prefer high-concept stories, but what does that mean?

Jeff shares seven qualities that will help us identify high...

Branding 101: Keeping Our Sanity while Building a Brand

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Yesterday, Jenny Hansen—my friend and occasional guest poster here—published an interesting article over at Writers in the Storm, her group blog. Due to her love of tech stuff, she’s sharing “hacks” for how to build a strong online brand. *smile*

She shared insights on what authors can blog about, as well as several techniques to help us identify who we are. In addition, she pointed out that we want to pick just a couple of social media platforms to engage with, as we can’t keep up with it a...

How to Make Every Story Idea the Best It Can Be — Guest: Jeff Lyons

Some stories tell an engaging tale that’s entertaining but doesn’t necessarily feel deep or significant to our life. Other stories make us feel like we’re changed simply by reading them.

There’s nothing wrong with either type of story. Sometimes we might want to read an entertaining story and don’t care whether we’ve learned anything by the telling. Other times, we want to feel deeply connected to a story or we want something more enlightening.

That’s okay. We’re allowed to have moods and pr...

Writing Craft: Balancing Rules and Voice

Many aspects of writing are subjective, so we often need to discuss how to find the right balance. One reader’s too little can be another reader’s too much.

To that end, I’ve written and guest-hosted several posts about balancing different elements of our writing, such as balancing backstory, description, emotions, and plot obstacles, as well as how to balance our writing elements overall.

A recent comment on one of my older posts brought up another element that we also need to balance: the...