10 D’s of Time Management for Writers

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“Nutty with a Dash of Meat” Jeanette Levellie here with some tips to help  you Shock the Clock and gain more writing time: Delight yourself in the Lord  Put God first and He will collaborate with you to help you meet your goals. Do away with fear Progress in baby steps, and ask friends cover you in prayer with each new venture. De-clutter and de-junk Managing clutter is a huge time-eater. Give yourself permission to throw or give away.  Enlist a friend’s help to de-junque.

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Tips from the Pros: Pam Farrel

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January greetings from warm, windy, but not-so-wintry Florida! Today, I have the privilege of sharing an interview with bestselling author and speaker Pam Farrel, a writer who also happens to be a friend. My husband and I have some fun memories of kayaking around Mission Bay in San Diego with the Farrels one sunny August afternoon. But I admired the Farrels first as writers and speakers who share heart-warming, life-changing truth. I know you’ll enjoy hearing from Pam today. Welcome, sweet friend! It’s good to “see” you again. How many books do you have published? What are a few of…

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Five Steps to Write Forward-Moving Scenes – by Gail Gaymer Martin

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Welcome to the Christian Author Network blog from Gail Gaymer Martin. Today I will be talking about ways to improvement elements of writing fiction. My experience comes from seventeen years of published fiction writing, and my pleasure is to share my expertise with you. Today I will talk about keeping your novel moving forward so that readers are caught up in the story and don’t want to put it down. Five Steps to Write Forward-Moving Scenes  A scene is part of a chapter in a novel. Some authors write only in chapters and therefore have far more chapters than a…

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Build a 3-Dimensional Hero Using Core Personalities – Part II

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Historical Post by Gail Gaymer Martin Build a 3-Dimensional Hero Using Core Personalities – Part II In Part 1, I explained Core Personalities and gave you the basic information needed to use these personalities to create fictional heroes and heroines. Today I will go more deeply into the subject of Core Personalities by adding more of the techniques novelists use to create characters. After digesting the personalities of the four core types from Terrance Real’s book How Can I Get Through To You, you can see the opportunities to build some interesting characters and create dynamic conflicts. Consider plotting a…

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Build a 3-D Hero Using Core Personalities – Part I from Gail Gaymer Martin

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Historical Post by Gail Gaymer Martin Build a 3-D Hero Using Core Personalities – Part 1 Today I will talk about using Core Personalities to help create a novel’s hero or main male character. This information can also be used for females, but since most popular authors are females, especially those who write romance which is the largest selling genre, we need to put our feet into a man’s shoes. Whether you write suspense, romance, or adventure, any genre needs 3-D characters. Author Mark Mynheir presented a workshop once on characterization and suggested the use of the Myers Briggs personality…

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Editing Tip #58

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Hi! I’m Kathy Ide. In addition to being a published author, I’m a full-time professional freelance editor. For CAN, I’m blogging about tips for writers based on the manuscripts I edit.          

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Where to Begin the Story

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Hello from Crystal Bowman! This blog post is for those who want to write fiction for children, and even for those who don’t because the more you know, the more you grow. Most of my books are for the children’s devotional or Bible storybook market. However, I have written several fiction picture books as well as few dozen I Can Read! books, so I want to share something I learned many years ago in my novice years of writing. The mistake many writers make (and I used to be one of them) is to write an explanatory introduction to “set…

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Save Your Darlings

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by Judith Couchman Might we in our rush to kill all our darlings risk beheading our only valuable bits of expression or insight?—John Crowley You write like crazy. Brilliant ideas spill from nowhere. Original word combinations flow. Then your editor says, “This passage doesn’t fit. We need to cut it.” The editor deletes paragraphs of your stellar work. You feel like you witnessed a murder. Traditionally, writers call these cherished but unusable passages and pages their “darlings.” Authors around the world, from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch to Stephen King, have advised writers to kill those darlings: the gorgeous words, sentences, and…

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