Five Minutes to Success: Master the Craft of Writing

Ask questions, even if they sound dumb. We all had those same questions until someone answered them for us.

Look into the future with me. It’s Launch Day. Who’s buying your book? Your mom, your sister, your best friend? Hear the sound of the dust swirling in the desert? That’s the sound of NO SALES!

We strongly suggest that even if you’re self-publishing that you don’t start Book 2 of a series while Book 1 is resting. Take notes, do your pre-writing, plotting, character studies, but there is a huge chance that Book 1 will change so much during the editing process that you’ll waste of your work on Book 2 if you do it now.

It’s said that over 80% of people want to write a book, but that only 1% finish one.

but I know that if I stop right now and start looking online for the proper hierarchy of honeybee hives, I’m going to end up down the rabbit hole. Three hours later I’ll be reading an article about the history of Notre Dame football, and I won’t have written a single word. So instead, I’ll write, “The drone bee AAAA buzzed around a rosebush.” It mi

I use a code when I write. It’s AAAA. This is a searchable “word” that I use whenever I know I’m writing something that needs fixing but I don’t want to stop my flow to do it right now.

Writing is rewriting. Get used to it. There will be changes. This is a good thing. But to change a thing, you’ve got to have a thing, so write the thing.

Every book you’ve ever read has been rewritten multiple times.

It doesn’t matter. Whether you labor over every semicolon now, slowing down the creative flow of the story and miring yourself in minutiae, or whether you just barf it onto the page and fix it later, I will never know. As long as you edit properly, it doesn’t matter one bit how awful your first draft was.