Month: February 2015

This Surprising Reading Level Analysis Will Change the Way You Write

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This article by Shane Snow originally appeared on Contently on 1/28/15.

Ernest Hemingway is regarded as one of the world’s greatest writers. After running some nerdy reading level stats, I now respect him even more.

The other day, a friend and I were talking about becoming better writers by looking at the “reading levels” of our work. Scholars have formulas for automatically estimating reading level using syllables, sentence length, and other proxies for vocabulary and concept complexity. After the chat, just for fun, I ran a chapter from my book through the most common one, the Flesch-Kincaid index:

I learned, to my dismay, that I’ve been writing for 8th graders.

Curiosity piqued, I decided to see how I compared to the first famous writer that popped in my head: Hemingway. So I ran a reading level calculation on The Old Man and the Sea. That’s when I was really surprised:

Apparently, my man Ernest, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose work shaped 20th-century fiction, wrote for elementary-schoolers.

Upon learning this, I did the only thing a self-respecting geek could do at that point: I ran every bestselling writer I had on my Kindle through the machine.

 

Read the full post, which includes many informative graphs, on Contently.

 

The Self-Curating (Mostly Indie) Slush Pile

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This post by JH Mae originally appeared on IndieReader on 2/4/15.

These days, self-publishing doesn’t necessarily mean your novel will wither and die, unread, on the digital and real life bookshelves. Books with polished writing, a compelling voice, eye-catching covers, promising sales numbers and an author with a decent reader following may be destined for great things. Meaning a traditional book deal.

With so many indie titles released every day, the pool of authors has become something of a resource for literary agents eager to unearth new talent and sign the next breakaway bestseller – and a testing ground. “Traditional publishers let the indie market experiment, then they swoop in and try to grab what has worked,” said literary agent Evan Marshall with the Evan Marshall Agency. “When a (book) is of high quality, the attention and popularity naturally come with it.”

The main indicator is sales rankings, which creates a “slush pile that is self-curating,” added Laurie McLean, a partner at Fuse Literary Inc. Basically, if the numbers just aren’t there and the book isn’t making waves in the indie market, it likely won’t stand a chance in the traditional one, either, added Andrea Hurst, literary agent with Andrea Hurst & Associates.

 

Read the full post on IndieReader.

 

The Writer's Plot Idea Generator

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This tool is from Pantomimepony, where you can find many other such tools and resources.

random story ideas

This plot generator creates original and random storylines for plays, novels, short stories, soap opera, TV series or a movie script. The plotlines generated are not guaranteed to make sense but they do inspire writers by triggering a creative chain of thought. Most of the results might be off-the-wall but some are pure gold. Keep trying and sooner or later the perfect idea will appear. Some plots sound like a short story; some will fill a novel or could even be the start of a huge franchise.

 

Click here to use The Writer’s Plot Idea Generator.

 

Productivity For Writers: 5 Ways To Become More Productive

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 1/29/15.

Some of the most common emails I receive every day include: How do I find the time to write? And how do you get everything done?

While I don’t write a book a month (at the moment!), I do get quite a lot done!

[Time poor and want to finish a book in 90 days? Click here for a free video series from Self-Publishing School.]

I published 4 new books in 2014 in ebook and print, plus I had another one completed and on pre-order, so technically 5 books in total. Plus, I published books in German, Spanish and Italian, as well as several in audio format, resulting in a total of 19 new products for sale in 2014.

Plus, a lot of blog posts and podcasts which I hope you found useful 🙂 So today, here are some of my tips on productivity for writers and a resource I think at least some of you will find useful.

 

(1) Schedule your time

We all have 24 hours in the day, and we all have to balance the real life stuff with the writing. Before I was a full-time author-entrepreneur, I would get up at 5am and write, then go to work. After the day job, I would come home and get on with building my online business. We got rid of the TV so I would have more time to create, and I spent every weekend working. I was so focused on leaving my job that I cut out everything that got in the way. I was driven to schedule my time incredibly well in order to fit everything in.

Now, as a full-time author-entrepreneur, I still have to schedule everything. You might have noticed that I blog, podcast and speak professionally, as well as writing books. It’s just as hard to get everything done, let me assure you!

So I’ll admit to being a chronic scheduler! But seriously, it is the only way I get anything done.

 

Read the full post, which includes five additional productivity tips, on The Creative Penn.

 

Music, Fiction, and the Value of Attention

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This article by Nicholas Games originally appeared on The New Yorker on 1/27/15.

The protagonist of Richard Powers’s 2014 novel, “Orfeo,” is a composer named Peter Els who, late in life, begins to dabble in biotechnology. Els’s attempts to “compose” in DNA turn him into a suspected bioterrorist fleeing across the country; one of his furtive stops is Champaign, Illinois, where he attended graduate school. In a coffee shop that he remembers from his student days, Els recognizes Steve Reich’s 1995 “Proverb” coming from the speakers. In the bravura passage that follows, Powers describes the way that Els listens to the music:

Another modulation, and the ghosts disperse. He wants the piece to be over. Not because of the thrilling sameness: monotony could almost save him now. Because of the waves of connection lighting up long-dark regions in his head. He knows better, but can’t help it: these spinning, condensed ecstasies, this cascade of echoes, these abstract patterns without significance, this seamless breathing leaves him sure, one more time, of some lush design waiting for him.

In the long tradition of novels about music and musicians, this language is new. The listening being depicted is a cognitive event: it happens in the skull and leaps from synapse to synapse, as if it were registering on a brain scan. The imagery of the fMRI machine was, of course, unavailable to Marcel Proust or Thomas Mann, say, who thought of music more in cultural terms than in cognitive terms (though for Proust the subject was, like nearly everything else, intimately connected to memory). But this new language—the lighting up of regions in the head—resonates, because a kind of folk version of neuroscience has entered everyday speech. Nearly all of us now speak of “chemical imbalances,” hormone levels, and how this or that person is “wired.”

 

Read the full article on The New Yorker.

 

Susan Straight On Learning To Write Without A Room Of One's Own

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This essay by Susan Straight originally appeared on the The Los Angeles Times on 4/9/14.

What does it take to be a writer: A room of one’s own? A weakness for words? To celebrate the Festival of Books, we asked five celebrated authors to recall a turning point in their evolution as writers. First up is Susan Straight, recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ 2013 Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement.

I wrote the stories in my first book by hand, in these places: at the counter of the Mobil station where I worked in 1979, between customers, eating beef jerky and stale cashews out of the nut mix no one ever bought from the cloudy glass compartments beneath my notebook; sitting on a huge rock at the beach in Rosarito, Mexico, in 1983 after my husband fell asleep in the tiny hotel where we spent our two-night honeymoon, writing in my notebook; sitting at a card table in married student housing in 1984 in Amherst with the small blue Smith-Corona my mother had given me for high school graduation; in a pale green 1980-something Fiat with brakes that went out all the time, upon which occasion my husband would have me sit in the driver’s seat and pump the brakes while he was underneath the car in the gravel driveway of our house back in Riverside in 1988, and I held a notebook and pen, writing.

 

Read the full essay on The Los Angeles Times.

 

‘Who Decided Our Worth?’ Do Free Books Give Away Authors’ Value?

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This post by Porter Anderson originally appeared on Thought Catalog on 1/28/15.

‘There’s Something Badly Wrong’

For those following the industry! the industry! in its digital melodrama, tossing books to the crowd free is not new.

But the question of whether today’s plethora of free offers may devalue books and/or authors in readers’ minds is not going away as easily as some folks wish it would.

The London-based author Roz Morris (both traditionally and self- published) became concerned enough about the issue this week to write Free book giveaways – when do they work? When don’t they? In it, she writes:

I’ll admit that I worry we give away our work too easily. If we create a culture where a book costs less than a sheet of gift-wrap and a greetings card, there’s something badly wrong. An ebook may not have material form, but it does give you more time and experience than something you glance at and throw away. And tellingly, the people who get cross with me for speaking out are the ones who say they refuse to spend more than a couple of dollars on a book, or berate me for not putting my books into Kindle Unlimited.

Indeed, the question of her headline — when do free books work? — is not the interesting part.

 

Read the full post on Thought Catalog.

 

The Secrets of Story Structure (Complete Series)

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This post by K.M. Weiland originally appeared on her Helping Writers Become Authors site. Note that while it references K.M. Weiland’s book based on her Story Structure blog series, after you click through to view the full post you’ll find links to her original blog posts in the series there.

If there’s just one thing that matters to your success as a writer it’s story structure. Story structure is what allows authors to create stories that work every single time. Story structure is what allows you to quickly diagnose and remedy plot problems.

The fear that story structure is formulaic and difficult couldn’t be farther from the truth. Story structure changed my life. The moment the foundational principles of this all-important technique clicked into place for me was the moment I came of age as a writer. Now it’s your turn!

In the Secrets of Story Structure series (which is the basis for my award-winning book Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys to Writing an Outstanding Story and its companion Structuring Your Novel Workbook), you’ll learn

  • Why structure is make-or-break territory for every novel
  • How to implement a strong three-act structure
  • How to bring your story to life
  • How to ensure your story built to have the greatest possible impact on readers.

 

Read the full post on Helping Writers Become Authors.

 

Corrections Are Good: How to Take Critique Like a Dancer

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This post by Kim Bullock (link goes to a site for Carl Ahrens, a major character in her current novel) originally appeared on Writer Unboxed on 1/30/15.

My daughter, who had not known a plié from a tendu until age nine, was understandably terrified when she entered her first class at one of Dallas’ most prestigious classical ballet schools.

She had been the prima dancer during her one year at a beginner studio, performing front and center in the recital. “Work hard and you can go anywhere you want in the dance world,” her teacher had told her privately after ballet lesson number three. I was in the room at the time, and I watched that spark of a dream ignite in her eyes.

I feared her passion for dance might be snuffed out by trying to compete in a room full of girls who had been on tiptoe since toddlerhood, but my sensitive perfectionist emerged from class dry-eyed and grinning. She did chinés turns all the way back to the car, narrowly avoiding trash cans and hedges.

As she twirled, she rattled off an extensive list of things she had done wrong in class that day: everything from her hyper-extended elbows to her weak turnout and lazy fifth position. Her old teacher had apparently failed to correct her bad habits, so she would need to relearn everything

Though she did not seem upset in the least, I had to ask. “Did you receive any roses with all those thorns?”

“She didn’t name my butt. If it sticks out when you plié, she’ll give it an old man name,” my daughter explained. “The girl next to me was told to ‘put Fred away’ three times.”

 

Read the full post on Writer Unboxed.