Articles
On the whole, the articles listed on this page relate to writing and storytelling.
In the first part, I created a list of articles I wrote that focus on writing a novel. Thereafter, I’ve created an alphabetical list of articles written by others. They have been collected over many years.
You are welcome to consider any of the articles listed below for publication in your website/blog/newsletter. Permission is granted to reprint for free with the resource box and byline intact (this information is placed at the bottom of each article).
To view the articles, just click on the article you would like to view and you will be taken to the appropriate page.
I am aware the list is long. So, please don’t get overwhelmed and close this page. Do take some time to view it. Scroll down the list (all entries have been placed in alphabetical order) and I’m sure you’ll find something of interest.
Thursday, 16 May 2013 23:25
Presentation Design – The Good, The Bad, & The Mediocre
Written by Aneeta Sundararaj
Presentation Design – The Good, The Bad, & The Mediocre Your job as a presentation designer is to make ideas into visual images. For your presentations to work, the visual images must convey exactly what you want to say and require the least possible effort on the part of your audience to “get it”. The difference between a visual that works and one that fails is good design. To appreciate of how good design adds to the quality of our lives, it helps to look at some examples of truly bad design that we all deal with on an everyday…
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Press Release Writing Tips A press release is an announcement of a newsworthy item that is issued to journalists and other media representatives. And it is a document that is generally formatted in a basic manner across the publishing industry for quick, efficient handing across the board of your news by media professionals. With regards to the basics of press release writing, here are seven basic elements that every press release should contain: * FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: These words should appear in the upper left-hand margin and you should capitalize every letter. * Contact Information: Insert this after the release…
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Polishing Public Speeches Most of us, at one time or another, were exposed to public speaking through our education. It may have been a college course, or even a high school class. Perhaps the entire semester was comprised of a series of speeches, or perhaps only a single speech was required in a wider communications class. Those courses taught us some of the basic principles of public speaking. We studied them, memorized them for testing, tried to make an effort at putting them to use during our unbearable classroom presentations and then moved on at term’s end, happy to be…
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Thursday, 16 May 2013 23:15
Point of View in Fiction - What's Right and What's Wrong
Written by Aneeta Sundararaj
Point of View in Fiction – What’s Right and What’s Wrong The great Chinese ruler, Mao Tse Tung, once said, ‘In order to break the rules of a system, one must first learn and understand them.’ (Okay, I paraphrase – he was actually talking about Communism.) But so it is with POV in fiction. Learn the rules first, then you can break them. I get so many emails from writers asking how they should deal with point of view that I thought it might be interesting to discuss the subject here. The truth is, there’s no right or wrong way…
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Playing Chicken With Your Story Part IV of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series And now we come to the hard bit. You’ve got your theme, and you’ve figured out how to bury it so that it’s there for you, and SOMETHING meaningful is there for your reader. You’ve let go of the temptation to write a message book—always difficult—and have embraced telling your story for the sake of the story. So you start to write. And you find yourself pulling back every time you get close to putting something on the page that might be controversial, that…
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Poetry in a Nutshell Poetry is more than just rhyming and prose that is in meters and verses. It is an art form. It is something that can not be judged by its cover and can not be critisized to the point where it just “sucks.” Poetry is about expression. Poetry expresses the way we feel on a certain subject through imagery and other senses. It helps us deal with our daily problems, be it good or bad. The emotion which is put within the poem brings it life. A poem without emotion is not a poem at all but…
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Planning A Heart-Stopping Story Part VII of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series Over the last six lessons, you’ve figured out your theme, and you’ve worked out at least one and possibly several subthemes. You’ve learned how to use blended scenes, intercuts, and cliffhangers to work both themes and subthemes into your work. You have great conflict waiting to happen. What do you do next? All of our discussion of themes and subthemes comes down to this. It’s time to figure out how your story is going to go. After more than 17 years of writing novels as…
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Friday, 10 May 2013 03:31
Pick a Theme for Your Next Storytelling Program
Written by Aneeta Sundararaj
Pick a Theme for Your Next Storytelling Program Recently when I was asked to give a storytelling program at a Saturday night session hosted by our local MetroParks system, the woman who called wondered if I had a theme in mind. What a good idea! It not only helps with their write-up and advertising of the event, but also helps the storyteller plan a cohesive performance. Because I will be telling mid-March, I told her I would focus on trickster tales (in preparation for April Fools’ Day). I already tell some trickster tales – everyone and all ages enjoy them…
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Friday, 10 May 2013 03:27
Parenting Tip: 7 Ways to Master Storytelling and Mesmerize Your Child
Written by Aneeta Sundararaj
Parenting Tip: 7 Ways to Master Storytelling and Mesmerize Your Child Human beings have been telling stories for several millennia. And, as parents, we’ve all heard about the benefits of telling stories to our children. The only problem is that, as with so many things, no one ever teaches us how to tell a story. The best that most of us can do is to emulate our parents’ and teachers’ storytelling, assuming that they were skilled storytellers. Although imitating skilled storytellers is a good way to learn, it’s also possible to apply a few basic principles. Follow these simple tips,…
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Wednesday, 08 May 2013 22:56
Now Appearing: 9 Tips for a Well-Attended Event
Written by Aneeta Sundararaj
Now Appearing: 9 Tips for a Well-Attended Event When I made the decision to do free workshops and book signings for my latest book, Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer, I thought it would be easy to draw an audience. I had, after all, done all the right things to prepare for this big event: I had a successful e-zine, AbsoluteWrite.com, sent weekly directly to my target market; I was a contributing editor at the most popular magazine for writers; had been interviewed all over writers’ e-zines; and had submitted articles to sites and magazines related to my…
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Wednesday, 08 May 2013 22:50
Nine Success Indicators for Tracking Your Book Marketing Results
Written by Aneeta Sundararaj
Nine Success Indicators for Tracking Your Book Marketing Results At the foundation of any successful marketing campaign are tracking systems—it’s helpful to know how your marketing program is doing. This is an area where I believe most authors (and possibly most business owners) drop the ball. It’s foolish to spend endless hours developing marketing strategies for selling your products without creating a measuring system to track the success of your plan. Here’s a list of some of the tools you have available to help you track your marketing efforts: Book Sales: Okay, we’re starting off with the basics. This is…
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News Releases 101 Who cares? Why do they/should they care? What do they want and need to know? If you can answer these three questions before you begin to write a news release, you've got a good start. Now all you have to do is make your release stand out from the avalanche of approximately 300 that editors in the Seattle market receive every day. How can you increase the odds that your release will jump out and grab the editors' attention? Here are some tips on creating a release that separates the pros from the wanna-bes: Put the date…
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Wednesday, 08 May 2013 22:39
Networking Your Home Business within Circles of Influence
Written by Aneeta Sundararaj
Networking Your Home Business within Circles of Influence When you need an auto mechanic or an air conditioning repairman, where do you turn for help? Sure, some people turn to the yellow pages. But most will turn to friends and family and ask if they know of anyone who can do the work. The best place for your business to be positioned is to be the business on the tips of the tongues of the people asked to make the referral. THE 300 RULE Preachers, funeral directors and people in a few other professions have learned “the 300 rule” through…
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Networking on the Net Networking is one of the most effective ways to find clients for any consulting or professional services business. But if you limit your networking to only what you can do in person, you’ll be missing out on a huge number of possibilities. Networking is more than entering a room full of people and exchanging business cards. It’s creating a pool of contacts with whom you can exchange clients, referrals, resources, ideas, and information. Networking can happen by phone, by mail, over coffee, and increasingly, over the Internet. The growth of the Internet has created many new…
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Latest Posts
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Sakshi
Written by Aneeta SundararajI have been in a state of ‘emotional unwell-being’ for seven years. There, I’ve said it. Why? Well, after my father died, I believed that if I reached out with love to ‘good friends’, counsellors, suitors, and relatives, there could be pockets of joy to offset my grief and loneliness,…
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The Creative Industry Needs to Look at Things Differently Post Budget 2022
Written by Aneeta SundararajOn 29 October 2021, the Finance Minister, Datuk Seri Tengku Zafrul Tengku Abdul Aziz tabled Budget 2022 in the Malaysian parliament. RM50 million has been allocated for the arts and culture industry. This comes after a year and a half after the entire industry came to an absolute standstill. With…
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‘The Covid Positives’ – life lessons learnt from the pandemic by Phanindra Ivatury
Written by Aneeta SundararajAfter a long drawn battle with the biggest catastrophe in our living memory, global humanity is finally getting to see some quintessential ray of light at the end of the treacherous tunnel in the form of COVID-19 vaccines, currently being rolled out to all parts of the globe. A ‘COVID-19…
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Chaos of Whole Books
Written by Aneeta SundararajIs it possible to read several books at once? Aneeta Sundararaj finds out.When I was a child, my cousin used to boast that he could read four storybooks at a time. As an adult, when he invested in an e-Reader, he continued to boast that he could…
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Writing for You? Or for Me?
Written by Aneeta SundararajWriting for You? Or for Me? ‘You must always write with your reader in mind.’ This was one of the first pieces of advice that I received when I began my writing career. Honestly, I found this extremely hard to do because more often than not, I couldn’t picture my…