Cheryl Cowtan on Writing

Wordle is a tool that converts a section of your text into a graphic. The graphic will feature words that are used many times in your text in large font, and words that are less often used in smaller fonts. Believe it or not, Wordle will take up to 90,000 words (and possibly more), which means, you could paste in your entire novel manuscript. Once you see your Wordle graphic, you can determine what words you might be overusing in your manuscript. For example: Is the word "back" in the same size font as your protagonist's name? Doing a quick "Edit>replace" using MS word will allow you to take out redundant words, and then recopy the text back into Wordle. However, make sure you do this on a copy of your MS and not your original. Later, you can figure out how to edit your manuscript to reduce the number of times you use those common words. With Wordle, what you're hoping to create is a mini, visual synopsis of your novel. So character names should...

I have been following the #Pitchmadness posts on Twitter and noticed that the slush readers have made a few comments about some of the #Pitchers not properly identifying their genres. So I've put together a flow chart writers or readers can use to identify the genre of their novel. In this post, I'm specifically going to be addressing genre for fiction novels. Genre is a category that novels can be placed in based on the content, the theme, the characters and other conventions in the story. Conventions are those consistent elements that we read about over and over. For example: a convention or common element in fantasy is magic. Easy right? Not really. Especially when a novel can belong to a sub-genre. Then it gets tricky. A way to avoid confusion is to think about the purpose or reason the author wrote the novel, and to think about how the reader would react to the novel. So let's put your novel to the test. When you write a novel you use a number of tricks (beyond t...