Middles make up the core part of any book or story. It accounts for nearly half of the book, so naturally, how big or small your middle is, is going to determine whether you're writing flash, a short story, a novel, or something that doesn't have enough elements to be considered a story.

Knowing the middle conflict of your story will tell you a lot ( Read more... )

Recently, I posted about improving your writing by raising the level of your strengths and weaknesses. This post is going to go into eight ways to make those improvements a reality.

( Find out about the 8 ways to improve... )

Everyone has strengths. Everyone has weaknesses. How you handle each can play an important part in how you develop as a writer.

I have two books that talk about making improvements ( not necessarily in writing ). One says that it's more important to maximize your strengths. By maximizing what you excel at, you gain a greater chance to succeed. If ( Read more... )

An old year is about to end and a new one about to began. Create a Market Hit List of the publications you would most like to get a story into for 2010 ( Read more... )

Writing Excuses posted an excellent podcast with Mary Robinette Kowal. She is an award winning writer, but makes her living as a puppeteer.

In the podcast she talks about how being a puppeteer has elements that relate to fiction writing. This was a very good podcast and you may want to check it out here.

As an aside, what things in your life have ( Read more... )

Recently, I submitted an entry into the Editor's Unleashed/Smashmouth Flash Fiction Contest. The contest made me think about how shorter works of fiction can be used as practice for creating or improving longer fiction.

I realize that there are some writers who only write poetry, short stories, or novels. And there are some that write in whatever ( Read more... )

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Strange Horizons, an online magazine for sf, fantasy, and horror, has a list of stories that they frequently see. This may be helpful to ascertain why certain stories may be rejected by other markets. However it must be noted that:

This is not a canonical list of bad stories or story cliches. This is a list of types of stories that we at SH have ( Read more... )