Kim Davis – Beginners Guide to Writing Craft

I chanced upon Kim Davis's page where she has a lot of helpful posts on the writing craft here. It's been interesting to me and I hope it helps you fiction and non-fiction writers out there too. I particularly like her post on Summarized Dialogue. She uses this technique to shorten long dialogues to make...

3 Vital Signs to Diagnose Your Blog’s Health

Wonder what kind of posts you wrote got the most views? Or posts that received the greatest number of comments? Check out a great post by Ben Huberman here. In it, he offers 3 key vital signs, like a doctor does, to detemine how well your blog is doing and what you need to do....

Writing tips from Neil Gaiman

  You can read several excellent writing tips by Neil Gaiman Here. It's interesting how a lot of writing advice surrounds around finishing your story. Finishing is harder than starting. Like a 42 km marathon. Maybe that's why I try to set myself a weekly word count to keep myself going. Just look for rest stop every...

3 hacks to be more funny in 5 mins

I consider myself funny, meaning humorous, not weird kind of clown funny. But making people laugh may not come easily to some. Laughter really breaks down barriers and warms up cold situations faster than an icebreaker. Even clowns use it at hospitals to speed healing! OK, I take back my comment about being clown funny....

Stop when it’s going well

A nice quote by Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City. I'll just state it here since it's quite short. My favorite “trick” is to stop writing at a point where I know that I can pick up easily the next day. I’ll stop in mid-paragraph, often in midsentence. It makes getting...

12 Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Guy Kawasaki

A insightful and entertaining talk by Guy Kawasaki who worked with Steve Jobs in Apple. I learned so much from these two men. My outline is after the video for your reference. Enjoy and jump curves *winks*!     12 lessons Steve Jobs taught Kawasaki 1. 'Experts' are clueless 2. Customers cannot tell you what...

Hydropreneur: Pitching

Pitching. The elevator talk within 30 seconds. Hook your audience from the get-go and reel them in all the way. End with a bang. I've pitched around 3 times so far. The first time I pitched was an absolute nightmare, the second time less sucky and the third time? I won't say it was good...

How to write to get more readers

I really don't know if you agree with Charles Bohannan in his article. He's saying to get more readers, we have to adapt our writing style. Write short and simple sentences. Small bite-sized chunks for easy brain digestion. This lends to the eye an easy reading comfort. But this conflicts with my previous post on...

Are your characters going nowhere?

Activity is not the same as productivity. That goes for all of life and writing too. For writers, that could mean having characters doing lots of things for absolutely no reason. Here's great article by Jennifer MacLeod on how to prevent that. To sum it up: 1. Give characters a strong motivating mission. Everyone has...

22 best writing tips

Found a great post by Melissa Donovan where she offers 22 fantastic writing tips. I'm particularly guilty of Point 8: Stop procrastinating. Turn off the TV, disconnect from the Internet, tune out the rest of the world, sit down, and write. I must admit I've wasted too many hours lounging in the sofa absorbed in...