My Courses

“Advice to Young Journal Keepers. Be lenient with yourself. Conceal your worst faults, leave out your most shameful thoughts, actions, and temptations. Give yourself all the good and interesting qualities you want and haven’t got. If you should die young, what comfort would it be to your relatives to read the truth and have to say:…

A number of websites will promote you book for free, usually by posting a thumbnail of the cover and a brief blurb about it. Some of these sites also let you post press releases about your book or to write a promotion for your book that they’ll tweet. These sites come and go as riding the…

If you’ve already started writing the next book you plan to publish, the back of the one you’re about to release is a great place to promote it. You might do that by offering readers an excerpt of your next book. This is particularly popular among novelists. Before doing that, however, you should be absolutely sure…

So you’ve got a story written and are about to send it to a magazine or a publisher. Congratulations! One of the largest barriers preventing beginning writers from becoming established is that they never finish their work. But now that you’re ready to send out a short story or novel, there are some professional guidelines to…

Q: Sometimes writing books and instructors recommend that writers a “project bible.” What is that? A project “bible” is a notebook of reference materials, usually kept in a 3-ring binder of looseleaf paper of story ideas that you’ve collected but not developed. Often when you’re doing something else, inspiration will strike on one of those ideas.…

What is a story? An idea or a setting or a character alone do not make a story. A fictional story is all of those and more. For the convenience of analysis and discussion, stories often are broken into parts. These parts typically are referred to as the five elements of fiction. They include:• Plot – How the…

“Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it’s so hurtful to think about writing.” – Heather Armstrong “Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.” – Leonard Bernstein “I take the view, and always…

Once you’ve published a book, one way to generate sales is to obtain positive book reviews on sites like Amazon.com and Goodreads. Not just any review will do, however. You want reviews that are meaningful, written by people who actually read and were interested in your book (Usually readers can tell when a reviewer isn’t genuine.).…