Janice Hardy's Blog, page 55
January 19, 2020
Sunday Writing Tip: A Trick for Finding Overused Words in Your Manuscript
By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy Each week, I’ll offer a tip you can take and apply to your manuscript to help improve it. They’ll be easy to do and shouldn’t take long, so they’ll be tips you can do without taking up your Sunday. Though I do reserve the right to offer a good tip now and then that will take longer—but only because it would apply to the entire manuscript.
This week’s tip is a bit different, but one I find incredibly useful. It’s my favorite trick to easily spot specific words or phrases.
To find all occurrences of a single word in a manuscript, do a search for it and replace it with the same word in bold and red.
That makes whatever you’re searching for pop out. Not only will it be easier to find, you’ll be able to clearly see how many times you’ve used that word of phrase on a page. The bold red stands out even when you zoom out of the page and can’t read the exact words anymore.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com
January 18, 2020
Real Life Diagnostics: Which Opening Page Is Better in This Historical Mystery?
Critique By Janice Hardy, @Janice_HardyReal Life Diagnostics is a weekly column that studies a snippet of a work in progress for specific issues. Readers are encouraged to send in work with questions, and we diagnose it on the site. It’s part critique, part example, and designed to help the submitter as well as anyone else having a similar problem.
If you're interested in submitting to Real Life Diagnostics, please check out these guidelines.
Submissions currently in the queue: Three
Please Note: As of today, critique slots are booked through February 15.
This week’s questions:
The first excerpt is how I begin the book. I'm setting the stage and introducing the main character. Action does occur in the first scene but after I set things up. My question is, is that okay or should I put the main action first to create more of a hook?
I rewrote the scene with the action happening first but then I'm not sure how to put in the information I think the readers need without slowing down the pace.
Market/Genre: Historical Mystery
On to the diagnosis…
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com
January 17, 2020
How to Accomplish More in 2020
By Janice Hardy, @Janice_HardyYou can get a lot done in a whatever time you have—if you manage that time well.
Even if you’re not a writer, managing your time is still a useful skill to have. I think just about everyone leads far busier lives now than we used to, and it’s getting harder and harder to cross off every task on our To-Do Lists. If you’re juggling a day job, school, a family, and writing a novel (or any combination of those), the hours vanish before you’ve had time to take a breath.
Katharine Grubb knows what this is like, and she’s put a lot of time and effort into finding ways to solve some of those problems. She’s launching a ten-week Time Management Boot Camp on January 20, to share principles on how to guard your time and energy, eliminate distractions, and build your confidence.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com
January 16, 2020
The Core of Every Novel: The Big Want & The Big Fear
By Spencer Ellsworth, @spencimusPart of The How They Do It Series
JH: As complicated as novels are, they really do come down to some very simple things. Spencer Ellsworth shares two of them.
Spencer Ellsworth has been writing since he learned how. He is the author of The Great Faerie Strike , a tale of the Otherworld’s first labor union, from Broken Eye Books. He is also the author of the space opera Starfire Trilogy from Tor, and many other short works. He lives in Bellingham, WA, with his wife and three children, works at a small tribal college, and would really like a war mammoth, please.
Website | Twitter | Goodreads
Take it away Spencer…
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com
January 15, 2020
A Simple Trick to Keep Readers Turning the Pages
By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy Scene and chapter breaks are the most likely places to lose a reader. Are yours doing all they can to keep them reading?
On Monday, I talked about writing without chapters, and one of the benefits of that was choosing the best places to end my scenes and chapters. Today, I want to elaborate on that a bit.
When I was still new to writing, I thought a scene or a chapter was a contained bit of the story. It started, and then it wrapped up by the end. It might talk about what to do next, but that happened in the next chapter. I made the same mistakes pretty much every new writer does. I ended scenes with:
Characters going to bedCharacters setting off somewhereCharacters achieving a goal and being happy about itCharacters musing about the next day or the next taskObvious foreshadowing of doom (dum-dum-DUM!)Melodramatic cliffhangers with characters in trouble or shocking revelationsThere are ways to make every single one of these work, but more often than not, they aren’t strong endings and don’t provide the best hooks for enticing readers to turn the page.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com
January 14, 2020
Want to Get Published? Read This.
By Laurence MacNaughton, @LMacNaughtonPart of The Writer's Life Series
JH: Writers write, but they also read. Laurence MacNaughton shares thoughts and tips on why reading is vital for writers.
I’ve talked to dozens of best-selling authors about their early years, before they were published. And the similarities between them are striking.
On average, they wrote about half a dozen unpublished manuscripts before they sold a novel. (By the way, this is what I call the Myth of the First Novel. Because it's hardly ever the first novel they wrote. Just the first one to get published.)
Aside from cranking out thousands of pages of prose, there's one thing they all do furiously:
They read every day.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com
January 13, 2020
The Freedom of Writing Without Chapters
By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy A first draft doesn’t need to adhere to a chapter format.
I’m not sure when I started writing this way, but sometime in the last four or five years, I stopped using chapters during a first draft. Instead, I write scenes grouped by acts, and decide later how those scenes fit into a chapter structure.
I don’t think I would have done this if I hadn’t started using Scrivener. Its folder and file format makes it easy to organize my manuscript into scenes and group them into chapters as needed. Writing in Word just didn’t have this same flexibility.
I discovered this “no chapter” draft gave me the freedom to write a scene and not worry about length, or even how it might transition to the next scene. I just wrote the scene and moved on to the next after it was drafted.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com
January 12, 2020
Sunday Writing Tip: Add Tension to the First Line of Every Scene
By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy Each week, I’ll offer a tip you can take and apply to your WIP to help improve it. They’ll be easy to do and shouldn’t take long, so they’ll be tips you can do without taking up your Sunday. Though I do reserve the right to offer a good tip now and then that will take longer—but only because it would apply to the entire manuscript.
This week, look at the opening line of each scene and chapter and make sure it has enough tension in it to draw readers into the scene.
We’ve looked at our scene openings before, but this time, let’s pat particular attention to the first line. Even if the scene itself has a hook, does the opening line have enough tension to get readers to that hook?
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com
January 11, 2020
Real Life Diagnostics: Does This YA Romance Opening Draw You In?
Critique By Janice Hardy, @Janice_HardyReal Life Diagnostics is a weekly column that studies a snippet of a work in progress for specific issues. Readers are encouraged to send in work with questions, and we diagnose it on the site. It’s part critique, part example, and designed to help the submitter as well as anyone else having a similar problem.
If you're interested in submitting to Real Life Diagnostics, please check out these guidelines.
Submissions currently in the queue: One
Please Note: As of today, critique slots are booked through January 18.
This week’s questions:
As an opening, is it hook-y enough? Does it draw the reader in? Do you get a good sense of the protagonist?
Market/Genre: YA Contemporary Romance
On to the diagnosis…
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com
January 10, 2020
5 Ways to Develop Character Voices
By Janice Hardy, @Janice_HardyIf you want memorable characters, don't forget to give them unique voices.
One of my earliest experiences with how voice affected fiction was in seventh grade, when my English teach played us a record (yes, record, I'm dating myself here) of Harlan Ellison reading his short story, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktock Man. Not only was I blown away by the story, but by the way Ellison crafted the narrative. The voice was unique.
It wasn't until years later I learned there was a difference between author voice and character voice, but the lesson on "strong voice = strong story" had been stamped into my brain. Character voice is simply an extension of author voice.
A well-crafted character steps off the page and into readers' hearts, and a big part of that is their voice. Readers can see personality in the words that character uses, in the thoughts they think, and things they choose to say--or not say.
Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com
