Merce Cardus

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LinkFest ~ Best Reads on Writing, Screenwriting & Self-Publishing: Yourself

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Best Reads on Writing & SelfPublishing 17

[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] There’s one person you can always interview, who will tell you much more of the truth than others ever will–yourself. -Orson Scott. [/perfectpullquote]

WRITING

While a lack of description details can be easy to spot and subsequently provide, if a writer doesn’t really get the natural flow of action-reaction, he won’t know it’s missing. Or know how to insert it so it’s believable.

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The Road To Character

  • How To Elevate The Writing In Your ‘Genre’ Book Or Screenplay | PAT VERDUCCI


Are you writing a Western, or a mystery, or thriller? Are you working on a horror story or romantic comedy? Traditionally, in both film and fiction, these are considered “lesser” genres. I’m not sure why, but it probably has something to do with the fact that these types of books and movies come with a set of conventions that the reader/viewer expects.

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 Literature And The Writing Process

Parataxis is the practice of combining a series of short, concise sentences with phrases that go together, but are not dependent on one another.

 

 

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Parataxis

When you’re writing a character, it’s important to know why she is the way she is. Knowing her backstory is important to achieving this end, and one of the most impactful pieces of a character’s backstory is her emotional wound. 

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The Emotion Thesaurus

Say you have a scene where two characters are talking in a café, and a bomb suddenly goes off under the table—the audience experiences surprise. Your readers’ emotional and physiological reactions are likely to be similar to the heart-stopping adrenaline rush a child feels the first time he opens a jack-in-the-box. Can you remember your first time?

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Mastering Suspense, Structure & Plot

The number one way to fill your story with tension is to keep your characters constantly off balance. There should never be a moment when your characters–specifically your main character–isn’t wrestling with something.

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The Psychology Workbook for writers

Sometimes the story you start out writing is not the story you end up telling. The beginning and the ending are two different stories–and the inevitable result is that one of those is the wrong story.

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Novel Writing Mastery

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 SCREENWRITING

That’s a good question. As any GITS reader knows who’s had to deal with time shifts in a script, it’s a tricky business because you are requiring the reader to jump from this time period to that time period.

Have you ever sat in a script notes session using every muscle in your body to keep your eyes from rolling?  Or mentally diagramming different — and creative — ways to take out the people in the room?  Or perhaps doing everything you can to suppress the urge to stand up and shout, “No, Mother Teresa cannot be a man!” 

Have you ever started a script and not finished it? Has it ever taken you 6 months, 1 year, or more to finish a script? Have you ever gotten so lost when writing a story, you became incredibly frustrated, and gave up? Chances are you did not do enough story preparation

  • ‘No One Even Became A Successful Screenwriter By Writing Less’ | GO INTO THE STORY

I followed up with John and in an email, he added this: “Every successful screenwriter I know has one thing in common — they write all the time.”

  • Brainstorming Technique: The Ultimate Blank | SCRIPT MAG

 The Ultimate Blank is a brainstorming technique that requires the writer to fill in the blank space with a noun that hasn’t been used before in another movie. Like other brainstorming techniques, it is a shortcut method to creating stories that are original and unique with only a modest amount of effort required. 

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SELF-PUBLISHING

 

Writing doesn’t have to be super complicated. But thanks to the countless number of apps that claim to improve your writing, you’d think it was some kind of rocket science. Whatever happened to the simple pen and notepad?

  • The Amazingly Simple Anatomy Of A Meaningful Marketing Story | WRITERS WRITE

Doing business without storytelling is like going hiking without a bottle of water. You will waste a lot of time trying to find something to drink before you can concentrate on what you want to achieve. 

  • Using Pinterest, Youtube And Slideshare To Cast A Wide Marketing Net | CREATIVINDIE

These could easily be three separate topics but I’m lumping them together because they form one branch of my marketing efforts… repurposing your content.

I hear from a lot of authors — traditionally and self-published — who are panicked to find their work being stolen. “I just did a Google search,” they’ll moan, “and found a site that’s giving my book away!”

A table of contents in an ebook helps readers navigate, especially on smaller reading devices.

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