Burying Your Novel’s Message

Part III of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series By Holly Lisle In the first two articles, we’ve explored how essential it is to have a theme to give your novel direction, and how to find those themes that will resonate with you. You’d think that once you have a theme, you could [...]

FieldReport.com True Story Writing Contest

Entry Fee: FREE Deadline: Check website; grand prize in February Guidelines: http://www.fieldreport.com Genre: Personal Essay   Fieldreport.com is offering a first of its kind true story writing contest. The website states that they give away $1,000 to a series of winning entries each month. In February, a grand prize winner will receive $250,000.   No, [...]

Writing Tip: Use a Timeline While Novel Writing

A timeline is an invaluable tool for the novelist. Using a timeline as you write your novel allows you to keep all your events in a logical and coherent sequence, and it prevents you from making silly mistakes. Some of those mistakes include having the main character in two places on the same date in [...]

Teaching Tip: NaNoWriMo in the Classroom

NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month program, has an excellent program to build excitement and love for writing in students. The Young Writers Program targets elementary through high school students.   NaNoWriMo encourages people to write 50,000 words of a novel each year in the month of November. Some people succeed and go on to [...]

Human Genome Project

I recently read an article in the New York Times that discussed the Personal Genome Project. This is a project to create a large data pool of human genetic records to assist researchers and scientists in the medical field. They are putting the information on the World Wide Web to make it accessible to researchers [...]

How To Find Your Novel’s Pulse

PART II of The 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series By Holly Lisle The best novels you’ve ever read—the ones that stuck in your mind and kept you going back to re-read them, that made you think, that made you feel, maybe that scared your socks off—were not about what they were about. Sound [...]

NaNoWriMo 2008

I admit it. I love NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month. In fact, I look forward to it every year, since I began NaNoing three years ago. The excitement, the exuberance, the exhilaration are all infectious and addictive. I use NaNo each year to start a new novel. So far, I’ve finished all the novels I’ve [...]

Writing Tip: Write Every Day

  A writer is someone who writes every day. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been published or not, it doesn’t matter if you keep your writing to yourself, or if you share it with the world. If you write daily, you are a writer. Writing is one of those obsessions/hobbies/careers (you pick the word) that [...]

Teaching Tip: The Perfect Writing Example

Students need specific writing examples to know how to write well. It helps to look at good writing examples, and we often do that. Yet, until you give students the opportunity to create their own perfect writing, they don’t know how it feels or what it looks like when they produce it. I use a [...]

Writer’s Journal Contests

Writer’s Journal has the Science Fiction/Fantasy contest open right now until November 30, 2008. Their Fiction contest is open until January 30, 2009. The monthly Write to Win contest has an opening line this month of “The coffee was gone, but…” You finish the story. For complete guidelines for each contest, check the Calendar Page [...]