Marcy Kennedy One of the most common writing challenges is avoiding point-of-view errors. It doesn’t seem to matter where we are along the writing path—from newbie to multi-published—point-of-view errors crop up like many-headed hydra. Just when we think we’ve got them all, there’s another head coming around to bite us from behind. When we start […]

Marcy Kennedy   If I took a survey asking writers what the most important elements of fiction were, I’d probably end up with a few consistent answers—plot, characters, dialogue, showing rather than telling. We might not automatically think of including internal dialogue on the list, but we should. Internal dialogue is the heartbeat of fiction. […]

Marcy Kennedy Hashtags are one of the best things about Twitter. (In case you’re brand new to Twitter, a hashtag is the # sign followed by a term.) Normally, your tweets are seen only by people who’re following you, but if you add a hashtag, everyone who’s watching that hashtag sees what you’ve tweeted. If […]

And now, for the winner of last Friday's THE TRICKY PART contest: Congratulations to Evelyn Berry, the winner of Laurie Schnebly Campbell's writing class. Evelyn, you can contact Laurie directly about your class. Today we welcome guest blogger Marcy Kennedy, author of Strong Female Characters, with advice for all of you who blog--or are thinking […]

by Marcy Kennedy Most of us think of a logline, tagline, and pitch as marketing tools we write after we’ve written our story so that we can use them to land an agent or as our book’s cover copy. We’re doing it backwards. If we wait until we’re done with our book, any problems our […]