I’ve been thinking about secrets. The characters in my novel-in-progress, THE DECADENTS, all have them. They have to do with desire, especially forbidden desire, and the destructive forms it can take when repressed. And as these secrets surface, one by one by one, the world of the story changes forever. I’m fascinated with the idea…
1 Marketers talk about how marketing has to be baked inyour product. The product is so cool, unique and remarkable that it inspires conversations, buzz, word-of-mouth. Because – and this point can’t be stressed or repeated enough – brand messaging no longer arrows one-way, from the television or the billboard to the masses. The Internet enables…
–1– If you don’t believe in your own abundance, you believe on some level that every act depletes you. That your talent is finite. That you only have so many ideas, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. You’re coming from a place of scarcity and fear. –2– The problem with fear is that it freezes…
We give it away because art is a gift, and the Internet is a gift economy. “As the ‘greed is good’ exchange-based economic system goes into terminal meltdown, alternative paradigms are emerging.” We give it away because the purpose of gifts is to establish relationships, and we are entering an age of interconnectedness like never…
I like to think of writing fiction as a difficult and intricate kind of magic. Magic = skills + art. You need to learn a rather stunning array of skills, whether it’s the rules of decent grammar or the principles of storytelling, and then you need to transform them into something your own. The dancer…
1 In a video that’s totally worth your time, Nick Campbell talks about the “creative gap”: Nick Campbell – The Creative Gap: Becoming Better Than Most from Nick Campbell on Vimeo. It’s the gap between how good you are now and how good you want to be. It’s the gap between you and your potential…
1 A writer recently told me that she felt a need to develop her “social media presence” because, even though she’s had a string of novels successfully published, she doesn’t think she has fans. “I have readers,” she told me, as we drove through Beverly Hills looking for a place to have a drink, “Not…
Become your own revolution. Your creativity is your birthright. When people try to chase or laugh or stamp it out of you, smile and ignore. You don’t know who you are until you know what you can do. People don’t see you as you are; they see you as they are. Practice deliberately. You have…
Many author blogs tend to be online personal journals. Writers will write about their life and give their opinions and share a bit about their novel-in-progress and maybe chart their daily wordcount. There’s nothing wrong with this – but if you’re not already successful offline, it can lack social gravitational pull. It doesn’t give people…
Hello boys and girls, I would like to present today’s guest post from one of the best writing-advice-givers out there, author-agent Donald Maass. By Donald Maass Author of The Breakout Novelist: Craft and Strategies for Career Fiction Writers Here are three things that glib, hasty or form declines from New York aren’t telling you.The solutions…
