Alice Kuipers's Blog: Book Club, page 45
January 26, 2015
thewritingcafe:
One crucial part of the traditional publishing...
One crucial part of the traditional publishing process is the query letter. It’s extremely difficult to write, but necessary.
A query letter is a short pitch that is supposed to hook whoever you are submitting to (most often literary agents (look here for info on that)). It is your ticket to possible publication.
Finding an Agent
When to Query
Format & Overall Content
Salutation & Information
Marketing Information
Author Bio & Credentials
Paragraph Two
Pitching a Book Series
Common Problems
Submission Guidelines
Sending Queries
Waiting & Follow-ups
Revisions & Resubmitting
The Call
All Agents Differ
Lots of Links
Tips for those of you who’ve finished a book …
January 24, 2015
hccfrenzy:
Like many of you, I read compulsively. I love books,...
Like many of you, I read compulsively. I love books, paper books, ebooks, picture books, any books. I read a lot for pleasure. But I also read like a writer. This means that I notice things that other authors are doing so that I can improve my own writing.
Every book is full of possible lessons for writers. Each time I learn something new from someone else on the page, I feel my storytelling possibilities growing.
Here are five useful tips for reading like a writer yourself:
1. Make notes and highlights. Some eReaders have seriously useful highlight and clipping capabilities. Use these when an author does something dazzling. Otherwise, good old pen and paper are just fine.
2. Read certain paragraphs aloud. When you hear how your favourite author uses language it’ll help you transform your own writing.
3. Notice technical skills on the page. If you don’t know how to punctuate speech, or if you struggle with how to use flashbacks, or if you wonder about sentence length or how to end chapters, take novels you adore and see how those authors managed these aspects of their writing. To paraphrase Stephen King, add to your writer toolbox. Think of each skill you pick up as another tool in your writing toolbox and notice tools that you’re missing. For example, it took me years to try writing in third person. Every time I see another writer doing it well, I make notes and appreciate their skill. Another technical aspect I note is good dialogue – when I see an author using great dialogue, believe me, I make notes.
4. Pay attention to writing that doesn’t work for you. It sounds contrary, but actually it’s really helpful for you to notice what type of writing fails and why. What is the author doing that makes the story clunky or makes the dialogue flat? You can learn lots from what is unsuccessful. Also, with writing that doesn’t work for you but that everybody else just LOVES, try to figure out why. Make notes, read it aloud, think about how each sentence is formed and what the author is trying to achieve.
5. Finally, and maybe this should have been first: read widely. Read lots of things you never normally read – broaden out to sci-fi, romance, poetry, plays, shampoo bottles, everything. Notice how every author uses words, not just authors you go back to time and again. In this way, you’ll broaden your own writing capabilities.
Reading like a writer helps me appreciate the written word – but I also remind myself to read for pleasure too. If I’m getting too writerly and forgetting the fun, I take a breath, turn the page of another book, and dive in.
Let me know how reading like a writer works out for you. Leave me a note on my site or on Facebook. Now, where did I put my book?
ALICE KUIPERS is the bestselling, award-winning author of Life on the Refrigerator Door, The Worst Thing She Ever Did, 40 Things I Want To Tell You, and most recently, The Death of Us. She lives in Saskatoon. Find her at alicekuipers.com and alicekuipersauthor.
January 23, 2015
I love images like this to let me dream, to give me a starting...
I love images like this to let me dream, to give me a starting point for a story - how about you? What does this make you think of?
America - Al Wildey
Come up with five titles of stories you might write… no...
Come up with five titles of stories you might write… no reassure, they can be terrible, but I bet one works out! Let me know!!!
Yellow books!
January 22, 2015
I love this image of piles of open books - all those different...
Use these photos to inspire your own writing today - what would...
Use these photos to inspire your own writing today - what would it be like if you lived in a different country? Where would it be? What do you imagine it would be like? What research can you do (online, with books, interviews etc) to make the details of your new life authentic…
The photographer Jake Lindeman spent this past spring living in Cuba. Take a look at his work.
January 19, 2015
I have been trying to write for a while now. I have all these amazing ideas, but its really hard getting my thoughts onto paper. Thus, my ideas never really come to fruition. Do you have any advice?
Write the ideas down. If they are going to be stories, try and tell the stories you would like to read. Finish the things you start to write. Do it a lot and you will be a writer. The only way to do it is to do it.
I’m just kidding. There are much easier ways of doing it. For example: On the top of a distant mountain there grows a tree with silver leaves. Once every year, at dawn on April 30th, this tree blossoms, with five flowers, and over the next hour each blossom becomes a berry, first a green berry, then black, then golden.
At the moment the five berries become golden, five white crows, who have been waiting on the mountain, and which you will have mistaken for snow, will swoop down on the tree, greedily stripping it of all its berries, and will fly off, laughing.
You must catch, with your bare hands, the smallest of the crows, and you must force it to give up the berry (the crows do not swallow the berries. They carry them far across the ocean, to an enchanter’s garden, to drop, one by one, into the mouth of his daughter, who will wake from her enchanted sleep only when a thousand such berries have been fed to her). When you have obtained the golden berry, you must place it under your tongue, and return directly to your home.
For the next week, you must speak to no-one, not even your loved ones or a highway patrol officer stopping you for speeding. Say nothing. Do not sleep. Let the berry sit beneath your tongue.
At midnight on the seventh day you must go to the highest place in your town (it is common to climb on roofs for this step) and, with the berry safely beneath your tongue, recite the whole of Fox in Socks. Do not let the berry slip from your tongue. Do not miss out any of the poem, or skip any of the bits of the Muddle Puddle Tweetle Poodle Beetle Noodle Bottle Paddle Battle.
Then, and only then, can you swallow the berry. You must return home as quickly as you can, for you have only half an hour at most before you fall into a deep sleep.
When you wake in the morning, you will be able to get your thoughts and ideas down onto the paper, and you will be a writer.
January 16, 2015
"We read to know we’re not alone."William Nicholson
"We read to know we’re not alone."
William Nicholson
January 15, 2015
Book Club
Tell me your favourite books to add to the TBR pile!
#readinglikeawriter
www.alicekuipers.com ...more
- Alice Kuipers's profile
- 357 followers
