Last time I wrote about how the beginning of a piece is supposed to “hook” the reader, to make them have to keep reading past the first line, the first paragraph, the first page. Now we need to zoom out a little and look at the beginning of the piece as a whole. Specifically, we need to ask, “Is this the right place for the piece to begin?”

That may seem like an odd question: doesn’t an article, short story, or novel start at the beginning?

Not necessarily. You’ve probably heard that a story needs to start in medias res, a Latin phrase meaning “in the middle of things.”

Great. What things?

Things. You know. The action. The events. Which

Frantically trying to get caught up after spending the last 3 days volunteering with the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon, something I do every year to honor the memory of a friend of mine who was killed in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building here. I’ve been a part of the event every year, as a volunteer, runner, or both, and this year was even honored with a profile interview in The Oklahoman, the city’s newspaper, even if the writer did misspell my name.

But enough of that! This is a writing blog! There’s lots of Great Stuff included this week: foreshadowing, characters who pop, pitching, the benefits of writing short fiction, book marketing, the value of reviews, burnout, learning from writing, and even some fun: one 2-year-old’s takes on books based on their covers...

Before I begin, remember that for each of the items I’ll discuss from now on, you have four questions to ask:

• Did it happen?
• Exactly where did it happen?
• What exactly is the problem? Or what just worked really well?
• What can the author do to fix it, if something needs fixing?

OK, so what is a “hook” and how can it be weak or missing? Whatever you’re writing—fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose—you need to catch and hold your reader’s interest: you need to hook them. And you need to do it early. How early? Well, in a poem it has to happen right away, in the first few lines, since a poem is likely to be brief. But this is true even in a longer piece...

If you read nothing else this week, read Joel Friedlander’s piece on the destruction of the writing web site Publetariat down in the Technology section. Protecting your blog or web site needs to be high on your priority list because there are slimeballs out there who will destroy web sites just for the pleasure of destroying them. If you have a WordPress.org-based site, I point you to a resource that will help you keep your site safe.

In addition we have posts on picking titles, getting everything right in a story, ending it well, ebook publishing options and resources, going to writers’ conferences, writer’s courage, and the differences between Microsoft Word formats and why that matters to you.

CRAFT

Kris Montee, one of the sisters who write as PJ Parrish, has plenty of great advic...

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty details of what to critique and how to do it, I want to give you a high-level overview of what the rest of this series is going to cover. We’ll look at twelve broad categories:

• Reader response
• Beginnings and endings
• Characters and characterization
• Setting
• Plot
• Flashbacks, flash-forwards, and backstory
• Narrative and dialogue
• Pace
• Description
• General story-telling problems
• Mechanical errors
• Positive reinforcement, and
• Other topics

Whew, that’s a lot! “But wait, there’s more!” Much, much more, as you’ll see in a minute.

Positive reinforcement gets its own section because writers need positive strokes, to hear that something they wrote actua...

It’s Tax Day in America, which is anything but a holiday, with millions of people frantically trying to do what they could have done any time in the last 10 weeks, but then, who LIKES paying taxes? So this week we have one post on that very subject, plus pieces on blogging, storytelling, characterization, publishing, “tweetables,” and making time for writing. Enjoy!

CRAFT

I know for some people there never seems to be enough time to write, so adding one more writing task seems counterproductive if not impossible. But Dan Blank (@danblank) makes the case for 4 Ways Blogging Will Make You a Better Writer on DIY MFA. He argues that blogging (1) makes you publish, (2) focuses you on writing and getting read, (3) adds new ways to connect to readers, and (4) builds the habit of writing (I’...

I wrote in the previous article about keeping track of how a piece of writing makes you feel when you’re reviewing it. In this post, I was going to explore identifying why it made you feel that way, but I discovered I should introduce another topic first: “Is that what the author wanted me to feel?” Both questions—that one and “How did this piece make me feel?”—need to be followed by the questions, “Why did the piece make me feel this way?” and “Why did the author want me to feel that way?”

Now, of course, you can’t have perfect knowledge of the author’s intent if you’re not the author  (and sometimes not even when you are) but som...

A couple of events conspired recently to turn into an important revelation.

The first event was getting the feedback from my beta readers. One told me a certain chapter stopped her cold and it took her a couple weeks to pick the manuscript up again. Uh-oh! Another told me she struggled through the same chapter. Double uh-oh!

Then, about two weeks ago, as I was reading through a chapter of a novel by a member of my writers’ group, I experienced a similar problem. Half-way through I just had to put it down. Uh-oh again! As I thought about why that was, I realized that while his chapter was well written in many ways, its major flaw was how much backstory it contained.

That’s when the 25 Watt light bulb over my head began to flicker.

My problematic chapter had a similar problem: too much b...

Welcome to the first full-week edition of Great Stuff! We’ve got craft pieces on info-dumping, writing sex scenes, and overusing particular words; business pieces on publishing, KDP Select, and book bloggers; floundering through social media; a tech article on how Google Glass might be used to read books in the future—or might not be; and a writing life piece on building good relationships with your readers.

CRAFT

Ah, the dreaded info-dump. If, like me, you’re a current or former professional who also writes, you can fall into the trap of killing the flow of a story by dumping information on the reader. Independent editor Jodie Renner (@JodieRennerEd) provides strategies for providing Info with Attitude that get the key things the reader needs to know across while keeping the action ...

[This is a reposting of a piece that was originally published on the Cochise Writers blog on September 10, 2011.]

Before I get to the first real topic in this series, I need to give a shout-out to local writer/poet/editor Harvey Stambrough for a blog post that he put up yesterday, “A Dozen Ways to Make Your Critique Group Work.” Good stuff there. Well worth your time to follow the link and give it a look.

New members of a critique/writers’ group will say, “I don’t know how to do this [provide feedback].” The tendency, I suspect, is to think they have to replicate what they had to do in high school and/or college English classes: things like identify and explain the symbolism in a passage, say, or compare and contrast the use of metaphor with onomatopoeia.

Nope! Nope, nope, nope...