When you’re starting a new story, determining POV is a very important choice. Writing from multiple POVs can be frustrating and confusing for readers if it’s not handled well, so you need to have a very good reason for using multiple POVs in your story.
That said, here are a few tips on how to craft a story using multiple POVs:
If you’re old enough, you remember the days of pen and paper writing, or dragging out the typewriter or word processor to write your novel. Planning your novel typically involved a notebook (or ten) to outline your plot, structure, list of characters, list of places, and timelines. If those notebooks were lost, stolen, or worse, destroyed, all that original work was gone. Wiped out. Never to be seen again.
Luckily for all of us, with the advent of technology, we have one less headache when planning a novel and can avoid devastation should the worst happen. The savvy geek writer knows to use the wonderful world of the internet to plan out their novels.
ProWritingAid analyzes your writing and presents its findings in 25 different reports. Each user will have their own writing strengths and weaknesses and so different reports will appeal to different people.
Remember, all the software can do is highlight potential pitfalls in your writing. It's up to you, the writer, to decide which suggestions work within your specific context, and which ones should be ignored.
Firstly, a clause is a group of words that contain both a subject and a verb like: She ran to answer the phone.
A subordinate clause depends on a main clause to form a complete sentence or thought like: ...because she could hear ringing in the other room
Similes can be found in all types of writing, from journalism to fiction to advertising. They’re creative ways to bring more attention and clarity to your meaning than straight narrative.
If you want to give your reader a thoughtful mental image while they’re reading, a simile is a great place to start. When you compare your main character to an animal or even an inanimate object like a giant sequoia, you’re exposing your reader to another way of looking at something that’s fresh and new.
If you haven’t used a Word add-in before, it’s very simple. You just need to download a small bit of software, which will then be automatically added to your menu in Word.
Click here and then click the green “Download ProWritingAid add-in” button. A small file called ProWritingAidSetup.exe will begin to download. When it’s finished downloading, click it and a window will open asking you to agree to the license terms and conditions. Once you click the “agree” box, you will be able to begin installing.
Using PDF files can be beneficial in more ways than you can imagine. It’s been more than 20 years since the creation of this file format they’ve always had a special place in the world of writing and editing. If you have PDFs that you work with, or would like to start working with, you might want to check out these 5 tips:
The Chicago Manual of Style, putting dialogue in the middle of paragraphs depends on the context. As in the above example, if the dialogue is a natural continuation of the sentences that come before, it can be included in your paragraph. The major caveat is if someone new speaks after that, you start a new paragraph and indent it.
On the other hand, if the dialogue you’re writing departs from the sentences that come before it, you should start a new paragraph and indent the dialogue.
Depending on who you subscribe to, you may hear some very different ideas concerning when and how to hyphenate. We’re here to set the record straight:
When in doubt, look it up.
Yep. This is the one form of punctuation that you’re best off looking up if you’re unsure. And another complication is that various style manuals conform to different rules. Add to that the state of fluctuation around certain words that can either be hyphenated, two separate words, or written together as one. Click through for some practical examples.
It’s the fear of every writer: writing a story your reader CAN put down. No writer wants to think their story is boring, but sometimes it is. Fortunately, there are only a few reasons stories are boring. Once you know what they are, you can make sure that your reader will keep reading.
Scenes are the rising and falling action, and the soft moments in between, that move your story forward. They have a couple of basic purposes:
After a painstaking process of planning, writing, and editing your work, it’s time to consider publishing it. For most writers, this is the most exciting and fear-inspiring task (possibly a greater heart-stopping experience than editing alone). Your work will be on display for public consumption, and you want to ensure it’s the best work possible. If you’ve decided to join the ranks of the intrepid self-published authors, then you have one—and only one—person you can rely on: yourself.
Back before we tech-savvy geeky writers existed, self-publishing was considered vain and a bit silly, and your work wasn’t taken seriously. David Wong, with his novel, John Dies at the End, broke that stereotype of the self-published novelist, and here we are. Now, traditional publishers are nervous (and rightly so) due to the wonderful world of technology.
I’d heard about ilys, this amazing online program that lets you only see one letter at a time of the words you’re typing. You can’t see what you’ve already said, which helps you focus instead on what you’re going to say.
This puts you in the flow. It lets your creativity jump ahead of your internal editor and crank out the words without worrying about typos and spelling errors.
All you see as you write is the last letter you typed...
Check out this great infographic to understand the difference between a homophone, a homograph and a homonym.
An adjective is a word that names an attribute of a noun. Some are strong and paint clear, specific pictures of the thing they are describing. Some are weak and vague and don’t tell us much. Let’s start with an example...
We continue our Where We Write... series with a look at The Novel Factory, a writing app that will appeal to all the planners out there.
The app walks you through 16 highly-detailed steps that include: defining your basic premise; setting out your plot points; fleshing out your characters; building your world; generating scenes; weaving your plot details together; and so much more. It even takes you through the submission process. What makes this program so incredibly useful is that you learn about the process of writing a novel as you go.
Did you know that a large portion of ProWritingAid users are professional writers? Some are published authors, some run high-traffic blogs, others run successful content generation companies. We love it when they take the time to share what they have learned over the years. We hope that their insights and experience help you become the writer you want to be.
This month, we speak to self-published author, Iain Rob Wright. We connected with him after he created a ProWritingAid tutorial video earlier this year. Iain was one of the first to see the potential of the self-publishing movement and managed to ride the wave back in 2011. He is now a full-time writer with fourteen books under his belt.
Web-based promotion has become just as important for writers as producing content. You can write the most suspenseful novel, the most scathing political blog, or the most comprehensive report, but unless you find a way to get it out there, your words will go unread. Social media makes up an estimated 30% of web traffic and offers a huge array of promotional opportunities. Most writers, however, don’t even scratch the surface. There are so many factors that increase the visibility of SEO-oriented content and it’s important to master the basics.
Here are 3 crucial tricks to drive up web traffic and increase your audience.
Here at ProWritingAid we spend a lot of time looking at the things you should be doing to get your novel done. But what about the things you SHOULDN'T be doing? In this essential post, Kathy Edens looks at five common things that will ensure that your novel never gets finished.
