Copyright © 2008 Faith Bicknell-Brown
All rights reserved, Wild Child Publishing.
If you've purchased the second volume of this series, then that means you're a serious writer bent on honing your prose until it excels above all of the rest. Writing creative fiction is sorely misunderstood by those who are non-writers and those who are aspiring authors. A great novel or short story doesn't evolve by just pounding it out on a keyboard. Nor is it simply scribbling something in a nice notebook that you paid four bucks extra for because it has a fuzzy pink cover with the words "Kickass Author" in gold lettering. Creative writing is like putting together an intricate puzzle. After you fit together so many, you begin to notice the little intricacies that help build subsequent puzzles. When it comes to writing fiction, the writers who study every part of the profession, thus learning all of the ins and outs of grammar and punctuation, too, will stand out from the masses. These books aren't meant to be the gospel of publishing how-tos; after all, fiction and many of the rules that govern it go through periodic changes due to the transformation of society, entertainment, technology, and much more. Moreover, this does not mean that one should use this as an excuse to be lazy either. (Woe to the writer who says, 'it's my style!') The information in my how-to titles is designed to give you good, solid know-how based on my career of over twenty years in publishing; I've learned by trial and error and I've learned through the guidance of some amazing professional editors and literary agents. Being a writer means that you must change with the times; it also means one must maintain and balance the new changes of the industry with the basics that every writer must know and use.
If you haven't purchased book one yet, in it I addressed:
In this volume, we'll go over original plots, overdone plots, character development (it's more than buxom blonde bombshells and hunky heroes, honey!), setting (what do you mean you don't know what setting is?), sub-plots, background story, how to avoid informational dumps--the bane of every good editor--and a few other topics that tie together neatly with a red bow on top.