Jami Gold's Blog: Jami Gold, Paranormal Author, page 42

Editing Tips: Top 3 Writing Craft Issues — Guest: Naomi Hughes

Editor Naomi Hughes is here again this week with the third—and last—post in her series about the top issues she sees in story and writing craft. If you missed my introduction before, she’s been joining us for a series of posts, each concentrating on a different stage of editing.

In her previous posts, Naomi first focused on the revisions that address the big picture of storytelling. That level of editing is often called developmental editing but can also be called content editing or structur...

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

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 help us make the best decisions for us. Depending on how we measure success, our priorities will vary, and we might make differ...

Editing Tips: Top 3 Scene Issues — Guest: Naomi Hughes

Editor Naomi Hughes is here again this week with the second post in her series about the top issues she sees in story craft. If you missed my introduction before, I announced that she’s joining us for a series of posts, each focusing on a different stage of editing.

As I’ve mentioned before, the titles editors use to explain their skill set can be a bit imprecise, so we’re going to concentrate on the functions of each editing stage Naomi covers rather than the names. For example, in her prev...

The Most Important Question in Storytelling: “Why?”

Last time, editor Naomi Hughes joined us to share the three most common storytelling issues she sees. I chimed in at the end of her post to add a bonus fourth issue.

A common problem I see—even in traditionally published books—is Missing Motivations. I promised to dig into this issue in a future post, and today is as good of a day as any, so let’s see what we can discover. *smile*

The Basis of Storytelling is the Question “Why?”

We’ve probably heard that many authors come up with their story...

Editing Tips: Top 3 Story Issues — Guest: Naomi Hughes

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I share lots of writing-related links (in addition to fun stuff like geeky movie trailers and cute animals, of course *smile*). Twitter can be a great place to find writing chats and blog posts with advice and insights we haven’t seen before.

Recently, I came across several of editor Naomi Hughes’s Twitter threads about writing craft and editing tips, some of which she’s compiled in Storify. Her advice really got to the heart of many issues I’v...

The Ultimate Guide to Pitch Writing

Several years ago, I wrote about various methods for pitching our story. At the time, I was thinking mostly about traditional publishing, so my perspective was someone looking to pitch to agents, including queries and “elevator pitches” (a story pitch short enough to give during an elevator ride at a writers’ conference).

However, story pitches are used for self-published books as well as traditionally published books. No matter how we publish, we need to introduce our story to potential rea...

Help! What If I Can’t Find Beta Readers?

Every writer struggles to get their thoughts onto the page, such as when we think we’ve included more than we actually did. We’ve probably all experienced a head-slap moment where we think something is on the page and we discover it was only ever in our head.

Similarly, every writer struggles to make their ideas make sense to others. Again, because of that “in our head” perspective, something that makes sense to us might not make sense to others.

The typical advice for how to resolve those i...

How to Make Our Story Feel Meaningful

We’ve talked before about how story is different from plot. As I mentioned in that post, a story’s plot—the obstacles encountered—is just a tool to reveal a character or a struggle.

The real key to a story is seeing a character change (or potentially, choose not to change, like in some literary fiction) or seeing their struggle to overcome the obstacles (whether they succeed or not).

But sometimes we can have lots of plot ideas, and we might not be sure if—or how—we can pull those together i...

Writing Goals: Discovering What Works for Us

In the years that I’ve been writing, I’ve seen several debates come and go on the publishing landscape. Plotters vs. pantsers (those who write by the seat of their pants). Self-published vs. traditionally published. Etc., etc.

As many of my posts here can attest, I’ve never been a fan of those debates. I’ve always said that people should find whatever works for them.

A good friend of mine jokingly worried how I’d react to her experiments with outlining. Now granted, I’m a pantser for the mos...

7 Steps to Making Envy Work for You — Guest: Red L. Jameson

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At some point in our writing journey, we’re likely to get discouraged. Things won’t go our way, they’ll be harder than we planned (or even imagined), and life will, generally, seem unfair.But we don’t have to stay discouraged.

Overcoming discouragement can be a lot of work, mentally and emotionally. We might have to face uncomfortable truths about ourselves or pick at some not-nearly-as-healed-over-as-we-thought wounds.

Like most writers, Red L. Jameson has overcome a lot of discouragement i...