Cheryl Cowtan on Writing

   Many blogs, articles and podcasts address the reader's error in not following submission guidelines as the reason for rejection.  However, there are many reasons for rejection and one of those can be the writer's style.     A writer's style is affected by the writer's "voice" and how the writer puts sentences together. Style is specific to each writer, it's unique. But that doesn't mean it cannot be changed.     Writers change their style to target their imagined reader, and to mould their writing to the genre and the format.    According to The Writing Centre, you can improve your style by cleaning up wordiness, by reading out loud to catch awkward phrasing, and by focusing on meaning and tone.     One suggestion is to remove repetitive redundant words that mean the same thing. I could remove either one of the "r" words in the previous sentence without affecting the overall meaning.    If you are ...

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...

The format for the #pitchmadness pitch included starting with a 35 word logline. Trying to summarize my 90,000 high fantasy, novel manuscript into a two-page synopsis was challenging enough, but 35 words? I was a little unsure if I could do it well. According to tweets posted by the slush readers, the logline also had to fulfill the following: Make grammatical sense Make sense in terms of the plot Have the same tone as the manuscript Sound intriguing enough to encourage the reader to continue So I started. And then I revisited it over a few days. And then I put in the final logline revisions right before submission. And ended up submitting this: Laywren’s destiny is to make war and fill the goddess’ Hall with souls. But when betrayers block the return of those souls, Laywren becomes an instrument of extinction, and children become the most precious quest. The next step in submission was to pitch the first 250 words of the manuscript. Lucky for me, my manuscrip...

Get ready to post your manuscript pitches to eager agents March 10th. See details and rules at www.brenda-drake.com.

Oh sorrow! Oh my! Oh me! I just discovered PitchMAS ten days too late. And I'm going to post about it, so you and I never miss it again. PitchMAS seems to be a query-fest that occurs between December 15th and 16th during which authors can submit a 35-word pitch through email to the twitter pitch geniuses. On December 19th, the top 75 pitches will be posted on this blog   http://pitchmas.blogspot.ca/  and agents and publishers will weed through and make comments or request manuscript pages. On December 20th, everyone and anyone can tweet their 140 character pitches with the hashtag #PitchMAS. The line-up of  ready and willing publishers and agents just waiting to find that perfect twitter pitch is pretty impressive, not to mention all of the authors and other industry folk following for fun. (Check out the list here  http://pitchmas.blogspot.ca/2013/11/epic-announcement-pitchmas-2013.html ). So, it's over. How can it help us now? Easy. Read through the list...

As a new Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) author, I have learned a few formatting points that I would like to pass onto you. KDP requests that your manuscript be formatted in MS Word or HTML. If you are writing or revising your content in Word, like I did, you need to know the following: INDENTS: Don't use spaces or tabs. Use the "Paragraph" feature and "Indent" "First Line" by 0.5" or 1.27cm. Paragraph returns may not hold. Instead go into "Paragraph" again and set "After" "Spacing" to 10. Insert "Page Breaks" between chapters or text may run together on Kindle. Insert "Pictures". Don't cut and paste. Don't use Headers and Footers, or page numbers in either. Do use "Header" font formatting for your chapter titles as Kindle will turn this into easy-to-use navigation. Do insert a "Book Mark" at your Table of Contents and nam...