The Art of Creating: 5 Free Tools to Amazing Visual Content

By Tanya Eavenson

Remember the first time you shared a photo online?

You carefully chose a picture of you and your spouse. Granted it was a bit grainy and maybe a little blurry, but no one minded, right? All they had to do was squint. Surely everyone knew it was you last summer on your honeymoon to Alaska. And now those photos will come in handy as you prepare your final draft from your Brides in Alaska series. Won’t those memes be awesome? Perhaps, but with today’s technology, grainy pictures are a thing of the past.

According to research, we are now posting a little over 1.8 billion photos a day on the internet. That is incredible! With so much visual content out there, how can we stand out? What can we do to make our own content grab people’s attention, even using our pictures from Alaska, without the grainy and blurry effect?

The wonderful thing with today’s technology is we have many photo options at our fingertips, including photo imaging programs. Best of all, many are free and you too can create exceptional images to share on your social media sites. With a little time and imagination, your pictures can garnish a second look, a like, or even a share.

Below you’ll find five FREE image programs that I use on a weekly basis to create memes for my novels or any type of visual content that revolves around my brand as an author.

5 Free Tools to Create Amazing Visual Content

Whether you want to make new memes for your upcoming release, share quotes from a novel, edit your photos before pinning them on your Pinterest board, or clean-up your pictures from your Alaskan adventure, these sites will help to create photos that tell a story — your story.

1) PicMonkey

2) Fotor Photo Editor

3) BeFunky

4) piZap

5) Canva

I would love to hear what your favorite sites are for creating amazing visual content. Please share the links in the comments below!

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Tanya Eavenson semi-finaled in the 2011 ACFW Genesis Contest with her debut novel Unconditional and was published in January of 2013. Her second novel Restored released in February 2016. She has also written several Bible studies that have been translated and published into different languages with Christ to the World Ministries. Her work is also included in the anthology, Sweet Freedom. Tanya enjoys spending time with her husband and their three children. She is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers and Word Weavers International. Her favorite pastime is grabbing a cup of coffee, eating chocolate, and reading a good book. You can find her at her website 

http://www.tanyaeavenson.com/on 

Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Google, or on Amazon.

Renewed, Re-visited, Restored, Re-told

By Ruth Logan Herne

It’s all in the “spin”. Or, to hear Bill O’Reilly tell it, “The “spin” stops here.”

Told and retold. Every author is familiar with the saying, “There are no new stories, only old stories, re-visited.”

That’s true in a lot of ways, and when you look at the vast number of books now available, the prospect of being new and fresh seems daunting, but I’m here to tell you it’s not. And why not?

Because they’re not Y-O-U.

Every author is unique. Styles vary. Opinions cover a wide range. And just knowing that your vantage point of a story might be different from any other persons can give you the forward thrust needed. Crime scene interviews demonstrate this plainly. If you interview five different eye-witnesses, they’re going to give you five disparate stories and descriptions. Why? They’re all reporting on the exact same crime.

1.       Vantage point. We can only “see” what’s visible from our location, and that view is unique to us and our story.

2.       Experience. Each witness is an individual with life experiences (or lack thereof) that color their point of view. When you translate that into character, their perceptions will be based on (and follow) their personal history.

3.       Line of sight variations. What we “see” is not always what’s there. Our mind will fill in ‘blanks’, a lot like that word puzzle that travels the Internet, showing how the mind will subsidize for missing letters. So we may think we see something that doesn’t really occur. Your characters may make assumptions the same way, creating their own new layer of conflict.

4.       Hearing. Sound is an under-used sense in a lot of first-drafts, and the subtleties of what the characters hear… and how they perceive the sound… layer their characters and possibly the plot. Step outside your scenes and look, listen and learn, then make sure what you’ve written speaks to the reader in such a way as to command their attention with warmth, humor, pathos, etc. Draw them into the room your characters share.

5.       Emotional punch. Our five witnesses just saw a crime committed. Each one will be affected in different ways based on that person’s character/past/experience/youth, etc. As you explore the emotional punch of your story through your characters’ mindsets, you’ll deliver your own version of that same old tale…

Renewed. Re-visited. Restored. Re-told!

I love to write about small towns. A skeptic might think that every small-town-in-America story has been told. They’re wrong. You can look around the average small town for a week and find enough story fodder to develop a book or a series of books on the standard give-and-take of the inhabitants. The same is true in any genre. Don’t re-invent the wheel. It’s unnecessary. Just use your version of the wheel to get the job done.

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Ruth Logan Herne is a multi-published, award-winning author of a dozen 4 and 4.5 Star contemporary romance novels with Harlequin’s “Love Inspired Books” division, the Christian imprint of Harlequin Enterprises. Her latest novel, “Falling for the Lawman” is available in stores and online now. She loves small towns and the quirks therein! Born into poverty, Ruthy’s a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps kind of gal who loves God, her family, chocolate, dogs and coffee. You can find her on Facebook, visit her at ruthloganherne.com or her blog at www.ruthysplace.com or find encouragement for authors with Ruthy and her Seekerville friends at www.seekerville.blogspot.com, voted a Writers’ Digest 101 Best Website for Writers award-winner.