Looking to fine-tune your writing? Need a little extra inspiration to jumpstart your initial draft or your final edit? Well, we’ve got lists (and in some cases, lists of lists) of books for your consideration. So, in no particular order, let's jump in! Reedsy offers this recently updated post: The 40 Best Books on Writing: A Reading List for Authors The Write Life provides a list of 34 of the Best Books On Writing Penguin Random House steps up with their take on The Best Books on Writing This list is a few years old, but still quite interesting: New York Magazine’s The Best Books on Writing, According to Novelists, Poets, and Writing Professors Listopia on Goodreads has no less than 722 books (!!) in the list Best Books on Writing (Books on writing, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and more) For those writing, or thinking of writing, children’s books, you might glance over this post on Michael Mahin’s blog, titled What Are the Best Books on Writing for Children?   What do YOU have o...

Photo by Cara Lopez Lee When novelists speak about their craft, I feel like a voyeur - because what is more intimate than storytelling? Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro recently told me that he drafts novels long-hand, partly because writing at a keyboard feels "like a performance." Actually, he said this to about a hundred people, but he was looking right at me! I had the privilege of listening to Ishiguro answer questions from fellow authors during his recent weekend with Denver's Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Ishiguro is the author of six novels, including The Buried Giant, Never Let Me Go,  and The Remains of the Day, which earned him the Mann Booker Prize. His comment that typing feels like a performance influenced me this past week as I faced a daunting rewrite. I chose to forego the intimidating task of typing-and-deleting, typing-and-judging, typing-and-regretting perfect little letters into my manuscript. Instead, I used a pen to slop whatever came into my head i...

From the New Yorker I saw this cartoon from the New Yorker and it reminded me of an underlying theme in so many of the panels I attended at the recent Left Coast Crime conference. LCC is more reader-oriented rather than craft-oriented, but even in the panels targeting readers, there were writing tips hidden amongst the panelists’ responses. One repeating theme was conflict. Without conflict, there’s no story, so creating conflict is obviously any author’s challenge. For example, the first panel I attended was called Couples Solving Crimes , and the second was Guns and Roses: Romantic Elements in Crime Fiction . In the first panel, the couples involved weren’t necessarily working as partners, which one might have expected in a mystery crime panel. Instead, they were often partners off the job, or had jobs that brought them together. But each panelist did mention that having dual protagonists, or a protagonist and a sidekick, was a way to increase the conflicts in the books. You ca...

To write is to participate in a lifelong-learning endeavor. The good news is many avenues provide the learning we need to better our writing. Editing, reading, teaching, and walking are powerful learning tools for my literary pursuits. I learn with each story I edit. The learning may tie into the writing craft specifically or with me personally, and even then, the “personal” lessons often find their way into stories I write. Reading books on writing or books for education, entertainment, or enlightenment always ignite ideas for writing. When I teach, the interactions and experiences in and out of the classroom become potential fodder for stories. Walking allows me to see and participate with the world and people around me and to develop new story ideas through that participation. In what ways are you fostering lifelong learning in your writing career? Shon Bacon is an author, editor, and educator, whose biggest joys are writing and helping others develop thei...

Every now and then, there's a scene that absolutely refuses to get from opening to closing in a straightforward fashion. When I was working on a scene for Danger in Deer Ridge , I had my starting plot points, there were only two characters in the scene (and one was asleep for most of it), and I had a reasonable idea of where it should end. As I worked on it, however, it was more like a connect-the-dots picture, but without any numbers telling you where the next dot should be. This scene happened to be one of my few ventures into the villain's POV. It's only the second time he's been on the page, so I wanted to show what kind of a man he was in a little more depth, as well as reveal some points that would heighten the tension. And, as I was writing, it turned out he was a lot nastier than I'd first thought. My plot points for this single-scene chapter: Bad guy is having an affair. He's thinking about breaking it off. He's looking for something he th...

Photo by Jason Odell One of the first things I learned when I toyed around with writing, was that despite decades of being a reader, I didn't know diddly about Point of View. I accepted the challenge, and discovered an affinity for using what author Suzanne Brockmann calls "Deep Point of View." I thought I'd share her tips, and add my commentary. In a nutshell, being in deep POV means you're in the character's head, very much the way you are in 1st person. You see only what he can see, hear only what he can hear. You're privy to emotions, to thoughts. The author isn't on the page. There is no narrator. And, just as with first person, you have to work to let the reader know what you want her to know, or not know what you don't want her to know. Nobody said it was easy. 1. Don't cheat the reader . If it's logical for a character to be thinking of something in a scene, you can't hide it from the reader. 2. Make sure your chara...

Photo courtesy of Jason Odell It's October. Halloween comes to mind, which in turn leads to thoughts about scary stuff. Goblins, Zombies, Vampires and things that go bump in the night. We all have our fears. As writers, of course we're afraid we won't be able to finish the book. When we finish it, we're afraid nobody will buy it. Or that it's got mistakes we missed. Or that it'll get bad reviews. Or we'll never be able to write another book. But that's not what I'm talking about today. I'm talking about things our characters are afraid of. Nobody's perfect. And nobody wants to read about a perfect character. We want them to be flawed, because that makes them easier to identify with. And we want to see how, despite their flaws, they can overcome obstacles and can conquer their fears to emerge victorious at the end of the book. I write a lot of action-adventure themes in my books. I put my characters in tight spots. In their action sce...

Last year, I had the pleasure of attending the MWA University held in Denver. I recapped the sessions on my own blog, and today I'm sharing how I've put one of the sessions to use. Reed Far­rel Cole­man , an author and adjunct pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at Hof­s­tra University, suggested that when you're starting a new project, you begin each day by starting at page 1 and editing until you get to the point where you're adding new material. He says he does this until he's written 50 pages. If you want to see the rest of what he said about editing during his session, you can find it here. For my next book, the third in my Mapleton Mystery series , I decided to give that method a try. My normal writing process is to print out each completed scene and read it in a non-writing environment (usually in bed). Then, the next day, I go over that scene, fixing anything I noted on the previous night's read. This gives me a running start for writing the next scene, and it t...

On my own blog on Monday , I started talking about pacing. As I mentioned then, although you can find entire books devoted to various aspects of the writing craft, an entire book on pacing is hard to find. The only one I discovered was about writing fast-paced action, and since pacing doesn't necessarily mean "high action," the topic is something one has to dig around for. As I touched upon on Monday, the pace of your novel has to be 'right' for the genre, and the pace shouldn't be the same throughout. Each scene has its own pacing requirements. Today, I'll talk about ways to control pace. Much of this information comes from workshops I've taken from Deb Courtney and Kelley Anderson. Courtney suggests paying attention to your own physiological reactions when you're writing a high-tension scene. What is your heart rate doing? Your breathing? Your writing should mimic these responses with short sentences, be they narrative or dialogue. In an ac...

Terry Odell, Mark L. Lefevbre of Kobo, David Boop I had the great fortune of winning one of two Kobo scholarships to a local writing seminar that took place last week. I'm sharing tidbits I picked up—the conference was focused on the publishing business, and inspiring aspiring authors. (I'm sure there's an editorial term for that last phrase.) I'm also recapping more sessions at my blog , which will be ongoing. For me, the experience was especially eye-opening because although a writer is a writer, we're not running in the same circles, and there are different approaches. These seminars were organized by a group of Science Fiction and Fantasy authors (with one romance author as a speaker), and their roads to success take different paths than mystery and romance authors. We tend to measure our success by our Amazon rankings, or royalty checks, so meeting these "successful" people whom I'd never heard of (nor had they heard of me), was...

Bas relief from Mamallapuram, India When we first moved to Colorado, we rented a tiny studio apartment while we went house-hunting. One evening, our landlords invited us up for a glass of wine and some conversation. She is a sculptor who works primarily in stone. She mentioned that it was interesting that we were both artists. Frankly, I'd never considered myself an artist, but we discussed our creative processes. There's an old saying that in order to carve a block of stone into an elephant, you simply chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. In writing, you keep adding until you get the elephant. If writing were like sculpting, it would mean being able to change what comes next, but not what came before. Scary. Really scary. I mean, I know authors who sell on synopsis, but when they write the book, it's all different. As long as it's good, there's usually no problem. When the sculptor asked how I created a book, what my preparation p...

 Last month on The Blood-Red Pencil , I talked about taking control of your work . Even when the characters are in your head, talking and telling you their story, you have to know where the story is heading so you don't write a hundred thousand words and realize there's no end in sight. The same is true when you edit the book. You have to know the one major theme that drives the story in order to know what can be cut or used to move the story forward in order to tighten the story up. Keep in mind, though, that most books have multiple threads. There may be one overall thread or storyline, but the protagonist is not following one straight line to get to the end. She or he has other things going on in their lives that affect how they move forward. But in the end, it has to come down to that main task or desire or action that is the center of the story. The smaller threads of the book can be resolved as the book progresses. One or two may not ever reach absolute resolution, ...

I attempted to write this post for my Writing in 140 series, but it couldn’t be done. Perhaps in four, five posts, but not in one. What topic presented itself with this abundance of words? Care. The care to become a better writer. For the last 12 or so years, I've edited hundreds of books, short stories, essays, etc. Only a handful, less than 10, have made me want to run for the hills and give up the editing profession. I mentioned this in passing to someone recently, and the person was surprised that the latter number was so low. Thinking about it at the time, I have to admit I was surprised by the number, too. Then I thought about it. How I present myself as an editor goes a long way in determining the type of clients I will receive. I am an educator. I teach. In everything I do, I teach—to include editing. My main goal as an editor is always to have a return client whose next work is better because of what was learned in the initial experience. Growth. That matters to m...