August has begun, which means it’s time once again to sum up the month that was. This month, our attention was captured by snippets into the lives of successful authors; questions of openings, dialogue, and creating that reacher-character connection; how to get our butts in those chairs; and more.
Take a look over the links below, and, as always, tell us of the amazing writing links you find throughout the month by leaving comments below!
Inspirational
Writing Life
Craft of Writing
Beginnings are the bane of the writer’s existence. Often, you’ll write what seems like the best beginning your book could have hoped for, only to realise in your next round of revisions that it didn’t quite hit the mark. Check out these six steps to nail your plot, motivation, character and story opening to help get it right.
Often considered one of the most difficult thing to get right, dialogue can utterly destroy your novel. Amy Nichols has put together a useful guide to help fix issues created by dead-end dialogue.
Creating the feeling of connection between reader and character is one of the primary goals of writing a compelling novel. If you’ve ever struggled with character sympathy, or you’re not sure if your characters live up to expectations, this is the article for you.
Compelling settings lie at the heart of fantasy novels, so where do you turn when creating your fantasy world? One of the most profound places to start worldbuilding is in response to contemporary society – create your fantasy world from social critique.
On Publishing
Win a Copy of How to Write a Novel!
How to Write a Novelby Melanie Sumner
U.S. Only
Vintage
Released 8/4/2015
In the spirit of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go Bernadette and Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project, How to Write a Novel is the hilarious and heartfelt story of a single-mother family struggling to get back on track after tragedy brings them back home to Georgia. A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL.
Aristotle “Aris” Thibodeau, age 12.5, is writing the Great American Novel. According to Write a Novel in Thirty Days! it shouldn’t be that hard—all she needs to do is write what she knows. Conveniently, Aris’s world is full of people who are more fun to write about than live with, like her single mother, Diane. Diane is an adjunct English professor who flirts with unemployment more than her Match.com dates, and, regrettably, does not know the difference between hair that looks messy and hair that is messy. Aris knows that if Diane would just accept that the perfect man is already under her nose—Penn MacGuffin, handyman, nanny, and self-described PMI (“Positive Male Influence”)—their lives would change for the better. After all, nothing gets a novel off the ground like a budding romance. But when a random accident exposes Aris to a dark part of her family’s history, she’s forced to confront that fact that sometimes in life—as in great literature—things might not work out exactly as you hoped.
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