A Book A Minute – What’s Your Goal?

By Doyne Phillips, Managing Editor for Southern Writers Magazine

In a recent conversation with Steve Bradshaw, author of the Bell Trilogy and other books, I reminded him of his goal he once shared with me.  He had a goal of a specific number of books to sell which in his mind would validate him to himself as an author. Most authors have a personal goal. It may be as simple as having a book for family and friends to read. Some write technical or educational books to be published for advancement in their career. Some write for the money which I wrote about in one of my Suite T blogs.

Whatever your personal goal is it is personal and share it only of you like. But how about a goal of “1 Book A Minute”? The idea came to me when I was looking over the books of Andy Andrews in a gift shop. I have always thought Andrews to be a great author as well as a smart marketing author. Yet knowing this I was still surprised to see the book mark in each of his books stating, “Every minute a book by Andy Andrews is sold somewhere in the World”. Amazing!  I thought to my self that is a lot of books and then of course I had to do the numbers. I came up with 1,440 books a day, 43,920 a month and 527,040 books a year. Over a half a million a year! That may or may not have been a goal for Andrews but if it was how do you get there?

As I said earlier Andy Andrews is a hardworking marketing author. He is known to travel to gift shops, book stores big box stores where his books are sold to autograph his books and return them to the shelves. I ran across him in a Walmart store doing just that. Speaking engagements with groups are a big benefit as well. Corporations with large number of employees will tend to purchase each employee a copy of the book the author is promoting or asked to speak on. This can lead to interest in other books the author may have and further purchases from the individuals. Once an author is established in a company they may be recommended to other companies throughout that industry. 

This straggly could give book sales a big boost especially if it is a worldwide business or industry.

It should be worth noting the bookmark does state “in the world”. This tells us Andrews has a worldwide market. As an author you should not hesitate to be thinking worldwide. With today’s technology you can reach the world from the comfort of your easy chair or desk. An example would be if your language is English reach out to English speaking nations to market there. If you go global and the markets warrant there could be translations to other languages.

Most importantly do you have a personal goal? If yes, what actions are you taking to get there. Do you need help? If yes, seek it out. It will take work but the effort is worth the results. Pick out your numbers to reach by the minute, hour, day, month or year. Have a number you would like to reach and get started. Let us know of your progress.       

    

Are You for Real?

By Tonya Calvert 

Sometimes, I ask myself, “Are you for real?” Not in that, “aww, Mom… are you for real?” annoyed teenager kind of way. And not in a profound nursery magic, Velveteen Rabbit kind of way either. It’s more like a “just who do you think you are anyway?” sort of way. It’s a subtle voice saying, “those other writers are real, you’re just a wanna be.”

I say I am an aspiring writer. I say writing is a hobby, just in case someone might think I am getting too big for my britches. The truth is if you write, you are a writer. This was beautifully said by Pulitzer prize winning author and professor of writing, Junot Diaz. “A writer is a writer, not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, or because everything she does is golden. A writer is a writer, because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.”

But don’t real writers have 10,000 followers on Twitter? Don’t real writers have big publishing deals? Don’t real writers write all day, in coffee shops? Don’t real writers get paid? Some do, but you are writer when you write. Period. Epictetus said it well, “If you wish to be a writer, write.”

But I don’t feel real. That’s okay. Keep writing. “It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who must be carefully kept” (Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit).

So, meanwhile how does a writer silence that voice? Van Gogh said, “If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter, then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” So, if you hear that voice that says you are not a real writer, by all means write…and that voice will be silenced, for real.

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Tonya Calvert finds inspiration all around her, especially on nature walks and at the Florida coast. She has a BS from Columbus State University and a JD from Atlanta's John Marshall Law School. Saylor on the Seashore(Clearfork Publishing 2017) is her first book. Her second children’s book, The Origami Elephant (Clearfork Publishing) will be released fall of 2018. She is married to her high school sweetheart. They live a blessed life in the Deep South with their three boys.

Cinderella, Mount Doom, and the Plot Dragons

By T.K. Thorne

If, like me, you break out in hives at the word “outline,” plot dragons can lie in wait before you get to the end of your book.  But knowing the ending, even the first draft of an ending, is critical to driving your story.  Two things can help you shape an ending—location and character.

Terrain can be a constriction that limits your plot choices or it can suggest opportunities. Your story may require a specific place or type of location. JRRTolkien (Lord of the Rings) had a super-powerful ring that needed to be destroyed. That meant either a very hot forge or nature’s forge—lava. Lava was definitely the more dramatic choice, so he needed a volcano environment for his climax scene. The trip to Mount Doom pushed the entire plot of the trilogy.

Using a location that is already familiar territory requires less description at a point when you need to focus on what is happening. For her climax scene, Cinderella is home. No need to rehash the general layout or the characters. We can focus on what decisions characters make and what happens physically and emotionally. In Lord of the Rings, the reader has never seen Mount Doom, but by the time Frodo and Sam get there, it feels familiar from the previous references. We don’t need many clues to imagine the bubbling lava, the smell of burning sulfur, and the stark rocky terrain.

Another way to approach the ending is to look at your character arc.  How does she change and how can you show that? Cinderella is a retiring, quiet, obedient girl, but she casts caution to the wind to go to the ball. When the prince appears, she defies her sisters to put her foot in the glass slipper. In Lord of the Rings, Frodo faithfully bears the burden of the ring to the edge of the cliff, but at the last moment, he can’t overcome the ring’s power. At the same time, that power is the ring’s doom.  Tolkien made his ending work in a complex way that satisfies.

Make sure the central character plays an integral part in the solution, either by wits or bravery—or, like Frodo, by failing—but not by coincidence or employing a contrived solution. Cinderella’s decision to attend the ball and be her true self caused the prince to fall in love and search for her. Sure, the fairy godmother could have poofed them together, out of reach of the clutches of her conniving family, but the reader would have felt cheated. Your ending needs to be surprising or, at least, not completely foreseen by the reader and, at the same time, inevitable in the sense that it needs to arise out of what has come before. The reader should say, Oh yeah, I should have seen that coming when Cindy lost her shoe. When Gollum appears at the end of Tolkien’s trilogy and grabs the ring, we are surprised, but it is not contrived. Gollum’s actions are entirely in keeping with his character and previous behavior.

Use location and character to help shape your ending as soon as possible to outwit the plot dragons, keep out of a writing lava pit, and have a happily-ever-after writing your book.

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T.K.Thorne’s childhood passion for storytelling deepened when she became a police officer in Birmingham, Alabama. “It was a crash course in life and what motivated and mattered to people.” When she retired as a captain, she took on Birmingham’s business improvement district as the executive director before retiring again to write full time. T.K. speaks on life lessons--how she accidentally became a police officer, didn't end up in a space capsule, and tackled historical novels about unnamed women in two of the oldest and most famous stories on earth, as well as writing a book from the case investigators' perspectives about solving the most infamous church bombing in Civil Rights history. Her writing has garnered several awards, including ForeWord Review Magazine's 2009 "Book of the Year" for Historical Fiction for her debut novel, NOAH'S WIFE. The New York Post’s “Books You Should Be Reading” list featured her first non-fiction book, LAST CHANCE FOR JUSTICE which details the investigation of the 1963 Sixteenth Street church bombing case. Rave reviews have followed her newest novel about the unnamed wife of Lot, ANGELS AT THE GATE, which won the IBPA's Benjamin Franklin Award for historical fiction and an IPPY award. Her screenplay in the film "Six Blocks Wide" was a semi-finalist at the international "A Film for Peace Festival" in Italy. Her website is TKThorne.com, where you can read more about her books and sign up for a Newsletter with inside info on her research and adventures. She blogs there, as well, and loves to hear from readers. T.K. writes at her mountaintop home near Birmingham, often with two dogs and a cat vying for her lap.

Thank You, Editors both Near and Far

By Annette Cole Mastron, Communications Director for Southern Writers Magazine

Today is my favorite editor’s birthday. Do you remember to thank your editor, not just after a project is done, but throughout the year?

An NPR article on editors shows just how valuable editors are to an author’s success. As the article states, “spending time getting a book noticed doesn't mean an editor doesn't edit. She often does most of the hands-on work at night or on weekends. And it begins when a proposal or rough draft is first submitted for consideration.”

"The first task is [to] just take it at face value: What is this writer trying to say? What is the project of this book?" Saletan explains. "Once you understand that, then you have to make tough decisions: Is this a good idea? Will there be an audience for it? Is this the right person to tell the story? Do they have the ability? If they don't have the ability, what's lacking? What can you bring to it? That's all the initial phase of evaluation. What I'm looking for is a mind that is capable of grappling with the structure of something as big as a book."

“But in today's competitive book market writers need an extra edge. So some literary agents, like Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Co., give a client's book its first edit.”

"I don't see what I do as substituting for the editor," Parris-Lamb says. "I want to make sure we have an editor."

“The editor has the power to accept or reject a book, says Parris-Lamb, so he needs to give his writers every advantage. He wants to be sure the manuscript that is being offered to publishing companies is as good as it can be.”

"After I've taken something on and before we send it out, we say: Let's take another look at this," he says. "Let's go through this really closely and let's spend some time before this goes from being a Word document in my inbox to a book that we're sending out to publishers."

If you’re giving yourself a head slap because you haven’t thought to thank your editor. No worries. It’s never too late to show an editor kindness by just saying thank you for helping you become a better writer. So, Happy Birthday, Lily, I appreciate your talents as an editor! I also want to gratefully thank my editors, Susan and Doyne at Southern Writers Magazine.

I’d love to hear praises from you about what your editor has done for you.

Get Out There and Be a Tiger

By Laura Childs

As an author who writes three successful mystery series, I’m asked repeatedly to share a few of my writing tips. And my answer is always a resounding yes.

Because writing a book – and getting it published – is a brass ring (not gold, just brass) that’s out there for absolutely anyone to grab hold of. But be aware, there are a couple of things to be mindful of: You need to have a clear-cut vision in your head. And you must be utterly dogged in your pursuit.

Put another way, you have to be fearless.

Yes, I know that concept can be difficult for many people. We’re human, after all, so we’re all imbued with a modicum of self-doubt which can masquerade as modesty, timidity, or analysis paralysis.

Here’s the gut-wrenching thing when it comes to writing. You have to absolutely, totally believe in yourself and the book you have inside of you. Because if you don’t have faith, nobody else will either.

So let’s say you’ve noodled around countless ideas and finally settled on one that you think might make an absolutely brilliant novel. But perhaps you’re also experiencing fits and starts when putting pen to paper. Here’s a trick – start with a single paragraph, a kind of elevator test that succinctly explains the gist of your book. Now expand that paragraph into two pages. Is your story starting to gel? Is your concept getting a little more interesting? Do you see a few more possibilities for plot lines and characters? Now see if you can expand those two pages to thirty pages. This will entail writing a flushed-out outline that, along the way, will probably yield some sample dialogue, sub-plots, new characters, and descriptions.

Along the way, you should also be taking a writing course. Try to find one that’s taught by a real author who (ideally) specializes in your genre. Someone who’s been vetted and published by an actual publishing house. You could also ask this person for a critique.

You see where we’re going here? You’re learning while you write, and getting professional feedback. Which will eventually land the ball squarely in your court. Because now that you’ve got an outline and some newly acquired writing skills, you’ve got to seriously buckle down and write your novel. This could take several months, it could take years, depending on your circumstances. (My first novel took three years because I was still running an ad agency.) Please don’t get disheartened along the way – this is the writing process that we all go through. If you begin to experience serious doubt or burnout, set your manuscript aside for a few weeks. When you finally go back to it I promise it won’t be nearly as bad as you think.

Once your novel is finished, do not pop that bottle of champagne, do not think that all the hard work is over. Now you have to find an agent. You need to hi-ho yourself to a writer’s conference – mystery, romance, whatever, and pitch your little heart out to anyone who’ll listen. Again, put your self-consciousness on the back burner and sing and dance the heck out of that manuscript! 

You also need to mine your friends, business colleagues, and acquaintances for publishing contacts. When I was trying to sell my first thriller, I had an advertising friend who put me in touch with Mary Higgins Clark. Mary advised me to attend the Mystery Writers of American Symposium and, when I arrived, took me by the hand and introduced me to a dozen publishers, agents, and editors. I also worked the room like crazy and passed out little postcards that showed my book’s cover and featured a short synopsis. In the end I connected with a terrific agent who wasn’t able to sell my thriller, but did get me a three-book deal that jump-started my Tea Shop Mystery series – and my entire fiction writing career.

Thanks so much for reading this. Now go ahead and write that book so you can get out there and be a tiger!

Love,

Laura Childs

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Laura Childs is the New York Times, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly bestselling author of the Tea Shop Mysteries, Scrapbooking Mysteries, and Cackleberry Club Mysteries. Recently, Book Riot named her mysteries to their list of “25 of the All Time Best Cozy Mystery Series.” In her previous life Laura was CEO of her own marketing firm, authored several screenplays, and produced a reality TV show. She is married to Dr. Bob, a professor of Chinese art history, enjoys travel, and has two Chinese Shar-Pei dogs. Released December 4^th – Laura’s new Cackleberry Club Mystery Eggs on Ice! Connect with Laura Childs at www.laurchilds.com or on Facebook at Laura Childs Author

Writing from The Heart

By Susan Reichert, Editor-in-Chief, Southern Writers Magazine

Nancy Slonim Aronie wrote Writing from the Heart: Tapping the Power of Your Inner Voice in 1998. The description of the book is: “With warm, lively, often humorous anecdotes, advice, and lessons, this unique approach to creative writing as a path to healing the self-shows how to reverse the damaging effects done to writers in school, where red pens disciplined grammar and taught them to mistrust their natural ability as storytellers--freezing them in their creative tracks.”

Nancy has been a commentator for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. She was a Visiting Writer at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, wrote a monthly column in McCall’s magazine and was the recipient of the Eye of The Beholder Artist in Residence award at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Nancy won teacher of the year award for all three years she taught at Harvard University for Robert Coles.

There is a quote from Nancy that I love, she said, “If you feel safe, you can do anything. You can take the risk of saying this is who I am, this is what terrifies me, this is what moves me, this is what makes me laugh. When you take that risk, you dig deep. You will access your innocence, your truth and your vulnerability and then you cannot miss.”

You will find schedules of her Chillmark Writing Workshops at this link.

Sometimes it is hard for writers to write from the heart, to do this we have to open ourselves up and let people see the real us, and that makes us vulnerable. We don’t want to be vulnerable. We might get hurt, disappointed, made fun of, and criticized. We don’t want to be judged.

Words can bring peace or war; love or hate, they can make someone feel they have value, or the words can belittle them, and they feel they are nothing. These aren’t only the spoken words, these are also the written words.

Our words from the heart are powerful. Those words can change a nation. We have all read many books that were written from the heart––some made us feel like we could move mountains, while others made us feel we didn’t have what it took to be somebody or to do anything grand.

When we are full of emotions, it’s a great time to write from the heart. Think about holding your baby for the first time and all those emotions that came pouring out of your heart. What you felt, what you thought, words were bubbling over in your heart.

Or the last time you held your mother’s hand and said goodbye. How did you feel, what were your emotions? Even through your tear’s words were bubbling over in your heart.

The emotions that come when someone deliberately hurts you with words, there is a great deal of words in our hearts, and emotions are mixed with hurt, disappointment and anger.

For a writer who keeps a journal, these emotions I’ve mentioned are great to list in the journal while they are fresh. You can go back at anytime and relive those emotions. Emotions are normally raw when they hurt. Which is different from the emotions of joy and gladness?

I hope you will spend some time listing things you are passionate about and the emotions you feel when you think about them. These are great emotions to bring into your writing!

How I Made it to Amazon.com’s Top 100 Paid Bestseller List…

By Kat Flannery

It’s a little frightening to consider the long climb up a list with more than 750,000 books on it, and to be quite blunt I had my doubts I’d ever do it again. My first book CHASING CLOVERS,made Top 100 in 2013 and every time I tried afterward ended in failure. I am not Stephen King, Nora Roberts, or Margaret Attwood whose name is reason alone for fans to buy their books…I’m just a small time author desperate to make a living doing what I love.

How did I get to #68 on Amazon Top 100 Paid?

Two months before, I’d been given my rights back on some of my books from my publisher. I decided to place new covers on them, a rebranding of sorts, and published them on my own. My assistant suggested I do a sale for the first book, LAKOTA HONOR in the BRANDED TRILOGY to showcase the new covers, and get more sales. It was a great idea and I was excited to show them off.

On a whim one evening I decided to try for a BookBub. If you haven’t heard of BookBub you need to research them. They have one of the best advertising out there for any author. Keep in mind it is difficult to get approved, and it is expensive.

To my surprise two days later I received an email from BookBub telling me LAKOTA HONOR would go out to their thousands of readers in three weeks!

Crunch time!

Let me be clear; to market your book will cost money. You do not need to spend thousands of dollars, but you will need to purchase ads. I have done this throughout my career whenever my book was placed on sale. Some have been promo’s I’ve gotten for free, others were articles, or blogs and cost me nothing, but for ads where you can potentially reach thousands of readers, you will need to spend money.

I had a budget of $900. I suggest setting a budget because it is easy to go over. I knew the BookBub would be the majority of my money. So I purchased a few smaller ads, Kindle Nation Daily, BookTweeters, and ran a Facebook ad. I blasted it all over social media, asking people to share and thanked every single person who did. I placed the sale in my newsletter, blogged and I was everywhere online I could be.

Within a few hours LAKOTA HONOR started to drop drastically on Amazon.com’s Top 100 Paid List along with Amazon.Uk and Amazon.ca. LAKOTA HONOR even dropped down to #10 on Kobo, which I’d never done before. Even more startling was my author rank. It went from over 600,000 to #15.

Be still my beating heart!

What made this experience so rewarding was not only that I made the Top 100 and stayed there for three days, but that my readers, friends and family all shared, posted, tweeted, and were excited right along with me. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be able to live my dream of being an author, and for that alone I will forever be grateful.

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Kat Flannery’s love of history shows in her novels. She is an avid reader of historical, suspense, paranormal, and romance. A member of the National Romance Writers of America (RWA), and other writing groups. Kat enjoys promoting other authors on her blog. She volunteers her time teaching writing classes and giving back to other aspiring authors. She’s been published in numerous periodicals throughout her career, and continues to write for blogs and online magazines. A bestselling author, Kat has been on several bestseller lists. The BRANDED TRILOGY is Kat’s award-winning series. With seven books published, Kat continues to produce up to two novels a year. Creativity is in all aspects of Kat’s career. She co-owned Prairie Dog Publishing from 2008-2013 where she published anthologies giving proceeds to local charities. She does Social Media and Marketing for her own career and businesses; writing ads and other content. Kat is the CEO and owner of Picco Press where she writes, publishes, markets and mentors other authors. Visit Kat at: www.katflannerybooks.com Find her on Facebook: Kat Flannery, author Follow her on Twitter: @KatFlannery1 Get Kat’s Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/cQmCzL

Get Connected to Publishing People

By W. Terry Whalin

Within the publishing community, who you know is almost as important as what you know. Yes, it is important to pitch an excellent book proposal or manuscript to the right publisher. As an editor and an author, I also understand people buy (books or manuscripts) from people they know, like and trust. How can you know more publishing people? From my years in publishing, one of the challenges is keeping track of the moving people.

Years ago, one of my six-figure book deals was cancelled because my New York editor had changed companies. My book was orphaned or without an editor directly responsible for my project. It taught me the importance of having a champion within the publishing house for each book.           

How does a new author with no connections, begin to get connected to publishing people? Everyone can use a social network which has over 562 million users: LinkedIn. This network is primarily business related and publishing is a business. To get connected, you need to take several actions:

1.      Rework your LinkedIn profile to show your activity in publishing. Do you write for magazines? Have you published books? Or possibly you have some other explicit publishing role such as leading a local writer’s group. If you have these types of qualifications, then add them to your LinkedIn profile.

2.      Begin to send connection requests to different people in publishing. These people could be book editors, literary agents, magazine editors, authors and many other roles. In some cases you will want to send them a little personalized message with your invitation. In other cases, you simply send out the generic invitation that you want to connect with the person.

For many years, I received LinkedIn invitations and ignored them. I had very few connections on LinkedIn and was not connected. Then I began to look at the background of the person and for most people, I accepted their invitation to connect. My number of connections increased and my public profile says the common “over 500 connections.” The real number of my LinkedIn connections, as of this writing, is over 6,700. These connections are varied with many different roles (mostly within publishing) Here’s the critical reason you want to be connected: when I need to reach someone that I’ve not emailed or called in a long-time, I check their LinkedIn contact information.

While there is a lot of movement within the publishing community, when they change positions or companies or physical location, everyone takes their LinkedIn account with them. This account belongs to the individual and is a way to consistently keep up and reach them.

LinkedIn has a lot of other functions as well but being connected and maintaining those connections is one of the basics and best reasons to consistently use this network.      

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W.Terry Whalin, a writer and acquisitions editor lives in Colorado. A former magazine editor and former literary agent, Terry is an acquisitions editor at Morgan James Publishing. He has written more than 60 nonfiction books including Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams and Billy Graham. To help writers catch the attention of editors and agents, Terry wrote his bestselling Book Proposals That $ell, 21 Secrets To Speed Your Success. Check out his free Ebook, Straight Talk From the Editor. His website is located at: www.terrywhalin.com. Connect with Terry on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

When Vagueness Works

By Chris Pepple, Writer-At-Large, Southern Writers Magazine     

Don’t worry…I haven’t gone crazy. Yes, I know that I spend a lot of time reminding writers to give plenty of details about their characters. We do this, so your readers can feel immersed in your story and connected to the people in it. Details bring characters to life.

Here’s the twist for now, though. Sometimes being vague can be powerful. You can write an entire story and leave the details up to the imagination of the reader. It’s true. Your vagueness can open the minds of the readers and allow them to give the characters traits that they most prefer or can relate to.

Honestly, I don’t recommend this often. It’s hard to pull off successfully. Let me give you can example to help you see when vagueness can be a powerful tool in writing. I wrote a short story about 20 years ago and created a woman named Maggie as the main character. In the short story, Maggie faces challenges in her community while trying to protect children in her community. (Spoiler alert: Maggie dies at the end.)

I gave no specific race or age for Maggie, though I do call her an older woman. I don’t give any clues as to where the setting is…no hometown or nationality given for her at all. She prays in the story, but I don’t tell you anything more about her specific faith or denomination. I do build in conversations, so readers know that Maggie is kind, loving, and well-respected in her community. The readers need enough information to see her as good. But that’s all I give them. The readers have to imagine who Maggie is.

Twenty years later, I still get comments about this story. Readers tell me that they are sure Maggie lived during the time of the conflicts in Northern Ireland. Others are sure that Maggie lived through the Civil Rights Movement. Some readers don’t know the original publication date and place Maggie in various cities around the world today. The readers are connecting to Maggie based on their own life experiences or areas of interest. The truth is that Maggie is all of these women. I didn’t create her to be tied to a particular time, race or region. I was vague, so Maggie could transform into someone new with each reader.

Give vagueness a try. It’s definitely not a writing approach that will work for every book or short story, though, so be sure to seek feedback to see if you have been successful.

Scene Building

By Lynette Eason

I’ve been writing for about twenty years now. It took me eight years to catch an editor’s eyes with a cold submission. That first year, I sold three books. Then a year later, sold five more. When I first started writing, I wrote off the top of my head—or by the seat of my pants. Now, my brain is much older! LOL. I need to do a little more planning to work my way through a book and have it actually make sense. One thing I was working on the other day was content for a workshop that’s coming up. I started looking at how to teach someone how to craft a scene.

I came to the conclusion that scenes were mini stories. They all need a beginning, middle and end, just like the full novel. Someone else may have already pointed this out somewhere, but it’s the first time it occurred to me.  You see, I write mostly from instinct. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve studied the craft, I’ve attended the conferences and the classes and even had one of the best mentors a writer could have.

But because I write instinctively, it can be harder for me to put into words exactly how to convey a topic about writing to an audience. I have to look at exactly how I craft something and then put it into words other writers can understand. Yesterday, I was working on Scene Building and trying to put a name to the elements that every scene needs.

I finally narrowed it down to these things:

1.      Purpose or motivation: This is the scene’s reason for being. Why are you including this scene in the story? How is this scene going to move the story forward? What are you trying to accomplish with this scene?

2.      Suspense – It doesn’t matter if you’re writing comic relief, a thriller, an historical or a women’s contemporary novel. Every book needs suspense and intrigue. This creates tension and causes the reader to ask questions and desire to know more. It’s really what keeps the readers flipping the pages to see what happens next.

3.      Fluidity – The scene has to make sense. It has to flow and not jar the reader out of the story. This is where a lot of writers make their biggest mistake and the scene doesn’t flow or there’s something illogical about it, then the reader gets frustrated at constantly being jarred out of the story.

4.      Relevance of content – This is a bit different than the purpose of the scene. You can have a scene with a great purpose, but the content of the scene needs be there for a reason. If it’s not important to the scene leave it out. Start your scene in the middle of the action. Leave out the nonessential stuff and boring narrative that the reader doesn’t need. However, that doesn’t mean you don’t want your scene rich with details that give the reader a sense of time, place and being right there in the story. It’s all about balance.

5.      Transition – The end of every scene must lead the reader into the next using some of that fluidity I just mentioned. Yes, you need fluidity inside your scenes, but also at the end of every scene. The transition must seem like a natural, chronological segue into the next scene or chapter. This is another even bigger mistake some writers make. When there’s no transition, then we get what editors call episodic writing. Meaning, you may have some great ideas for scenes, but that’s all they are—separate scenes that don’t seem to have any kind of connection.

6.      Hook or cliffhanger – Be sure to have one of these at the end of the scene. This is what’s going to keep the reader coming back—and is also part of that whole suspense thing.

I hope you found this helpful! Good luck with all of your writing projects. Now go craft the most amazing scenes ever!

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Lynette Eason is the bestselling author of Oath of Honor, as well as the Women of Justice series, the Deadly Reunions series, the Hidden Identity series, and the Elite Guardians series. She is the winner of two ACFW Carol Awards, the Selah Award, and the Inspirational Reader’s Choice Award. She has a master’s degree in education from Converse College and lives in South Carolina. Learn more at www.lynetteeason.com.