Attention-Grabbing Cover and Query Letters You’ve labored over your manuscript for months. It’s a polished, spell-checked, one-of-a-kind manuscript. Now it’s time to approach an editor. Does the editor want to see a complete manuscript with a cover letter, or a query letter? Either way, you’ll have about ten seconds to get his or her attention. What is a cover letter? A cover letter is a busine...

Attitude – Your Secret Weapon Follow your instincts we are told. But is this good advice? Instinct helps us to decide what’s right and wrong. It can help us plan a course of action that sits well with our conscience or life-view. We can do great things following our instincts. But our instincts can be wrong. We all know of examples when, sometimes, our instincts encourage us to undermine or to ...

Audience Participation Adds Pizzazz to Your Storytelling I have mentioned audience participation and its importance and in previous articles, but decided to really delve into more thoughts and ideas about the why, what, who, where, when, and how of audience participation while telling stories. There are many forms of audience participation from the subtle interaction between teller and listeners ...

Avoid the Top Ten Costly Author Mistakes with Professional Coaching Maybe you are thinking about it. Maybe you don’t know it it’s worth it. A book coach can help you save time, frustration, and money down the drain because you will stop book writing, publishing, and promotion mistakes before they start. Here’s some common mistakes and how you can avoid them. One. Emerging authors don’t know the...

A Treasure Trunk of Tellers’ Tips By Chris King, Patti Christensen, Rose the Story Lady, Stephen Hollen, Steve Otto, Mary Morgan Smith, Sharon Kirk Clifton, and Dianne de Las Casas Every two months I have had the delightful opportunity to share tips from my storytelling friends in the Tips Column in the National Storytelling Network’s (NSN) Storytelling Magazine. Realizing that not everyone who v...

The Full Stop Let’s start with the end – the full stop. There’s nothing worse than being led down the garden path with a long winding sentence, that doesn’t really seem to go anywhere, that slowly starts to bore you to death with all of the commas, and don’t forget the conjunctions, that are trying to hold the terribly long sentence together. Now, wasn’t that boring? Didn’t it make you want to te...

Grammar Did Not Give Birth to Your Mother POP QUIZ Grammar Question 1 – Grammar is: A) the nice lady your mother calls Mum, who bakes tasty chocolate chip cookies; B) your mother singing a telegram; or C) the branch of linguistics that deals with syntax and morphology. Ignore that your mouth is probably watering for a chocolate chip cookie or that you are having visions of your mother danci...

The Character Next Door So you finally have the time to finish that story. Your outline touches on every aspect of the plot. You’ve made it the best that it can be. You’re sure your efforts have the right mix of suspense, humor, clarity and originality. All of that is necessary, but what about connecting with your readers? Fiction writing isn’t the same as weaving fairy tales or campfire stories...

Reposition Your Preposition Never end a sentence with a preposition! This is one of the first rules of writing you may have learnt in high school English. It is the one grammar rule that was always enforced, especially when writing essays. It is also one of the easiest rules to break, because sometimes a sentence just doesn’t sound right any other way. So the question at hand is whether or not th...