Noah Lukeman started as an editor for a major publishing company before becoming a literary agent. He is often a guest speaker on topics related to writing and publishing. The Plot Thickens and The First Five Pages are my favourites of his writing craft and editing books. Working through The Plot Thickens  is most valuable after fully completing a first draft, because we learn best from our own mistakes, and those going for the second round will have many lightbulb moments ahead of the revision or rewrite.  The Plot Thickens starts by re-developing the characters in your work and how the character changes through the book. Lukeman provides hundreds of questions to consider across every facet of a character. Not every question or topic will apply to every character, but his prompts are bound to help you develop extra information about your character that you can use in your work. As you work through the questions, take each insight back to the plot of your bo...

Punctuation orders thought and clarifies communication. There are rules for its use, which I will leave to our Style Maven to share. I'm headed into more creative territory, where writers also view punctuation as a series of pauses and stops that can order a reader’s emotional response to the work. Noah Lukeman wrote a book about it: A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation . Think punctuation is too dry to hold your interest? Think again. This book kept me reading until its final period, which comes shortly after this insight: If you cultivate awareness and are willing to learn, punctuation will perpetually teach you something new about yourself. As we learned throughout the book, punctuation reveals the writer, and revelation is the first step toward self-awareness. If you are willing to listen to what the page is telling you about yourself, and humble enough to change, you will become a better writer. I find this claim irresistible. Here are three excerpt...

How to Write a Great Query Letter is a free e-book available for download here . “A layman looks at a query and sees a one page letter. An agent looks at it and scans it for [a hundred] different criteria. If you know what to look for, this mere page can tell you more about the writer and his work than you can possibly imagine.” ~ Noah Lukeman, How to Write a Great Query Letter ~ As a literary agent, Noah Lukeman has dealt with tens of thousands of query letters and decided to analyse the elements that he considers vital in a great query letter – the type that makes him so excited at the end of a long day of trawling through banal submissions that he simply has to pick up the phone and call the author right away, no matter what time it may be. The most important element, Lukeman says, is sending your query to the right person. This is research that you cannot skimp on. Lukeman has devoted another entire e-book, How to Land (and Keep) a Literary Agent *, to this topic. Lukeman ...