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In one of our recent Writers for a Reason Unite groups, one of the things we talked about was weaving a message into our stories. How do we do this gently, with respect? After all, we are not here to persuade, as much as allow readers to think through issues of faith, and make up their own minds.
Of course, as Christians, we would love everyone to share our faith! But not everyone will choose to do so, and that’s between them and God – our job is to simply to share our story.
This episode will help you think about how you can weave a brilliant message into a story your readers will love.
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We usually start of with a good idea of what our characters look like. But what about other parts of their personality?
Here's a writing exercise for you to do, that will help you get to know your characters better.
Try this in your writers' groups as well as on your own!
Hear you again soon,
Janet
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Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
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With your theme and message in mind, how will your protagonist, and any other characters, change during the course of your story?
How will they be different at the end, than they were at the beginning?
How will you show the difference?Listen to the podcast and get some tips!
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Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
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Keeping up the pace in our stories is essential, if we want to hold our readers' attention.
This is even more true today than it was a few years ago!
So how can we do this?
Here are some fun creative writing tips, to help your story zip along at a great pace!Support the show
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This may sound like a daft question, but knowing who you want to write for, and why, is an important foundation for our writing.
We can have what we think is a brilliant idea for a story, but will it resonate with our target audience?
This episode will help you narrow down your target audience and get your mission statement sorted... resulting in clarity - and that's a wonderful thing!Support the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
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Today I have a little tip for you, on writing dialogue. Someone was asking me recently about what mistakes I see most often in dialogue, and one of them is that their characters all sound too similar.
The way people speak will denote their character. A bold person, for example, will speak boldly. A timid person will use completely different words, and express them in a different way. The bold person will be direct. The timid person may beat about the bush, go red, fumble and look at the ground. The bold person might fold their arms, stand their ground, and look you in the eye.
So show how your characters are feeling, and their personality, in your dialogue, by their actions as well as their words.Listen to the episode and you might glean a few tips for your own characters, and their dialogue.
Until next time, be blessed!
JanetSupport the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
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We are leaving a legacy with our writing, whether we are thinking about it or not. So why not be intentional? Listen to this episode and be inspired to change lives with your stories.
Support the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
Click on this link to find out more.
Oh, and do leave a review on your podcast app - it really does help a lot. Thank you! :-) -
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We may avoid conflicts in real life, but in our stories we should embrace them as our best friends, because without conflicts we do not have a story!
In this pocast episode we get deeper into conflicts, so grab your writing journal and get ready to take your story to the next level.
Oh, and there are a couple of exercised for you to do!
Enjoy!Support the show
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Hi, Janet Wilson here.
The issue with writing fantasy, and how we deal with it as Christians, came up in one of our Writers for a Reason Unite meetings recently.
One of our members had been reading a children’s book, where witchcraft, magic and spells were included in the story. As Christian writers, we’re not going to be including any of these things, of course… but what about fantasy? What about where a character is taken ‘as if by magic’ to another time and place, for example?Where do we draw the line?
Here are some guidelines – feel free to disagree! But let's at least think about these things.
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Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
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In this episode, Janet looks at the whole subject of inspiration.
Sometimes we have to go out looking for inspiration... it doesn't always come when we want it... here's how, and why.
Enjoy!Support the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
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What writing times work best for you?
How often should you write?
The advice write every day is excellent advice!
But not for everyone can stick to that, and it can be counter-productive to attempt something that doesn’t work with your current lifestyle. It’s depressing to feel you have failed, and totally unnecessary!
Listen to the episode for practical advice for fitting in your writing time with your own personal circumstances... and still get your story done. :-)Support the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
Click on this link to find out more.
Oh, and do leave a review on your podcast app - it really does help a lot. Thank you! :-) -
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Asking who you want to write for and why may sound like a really daft question, but when you think about it, it's absolutely foundational to writing a successful story.
Listen to this episode and see if you agree!
Oh, and grab your writing journal and a pen, because there's a writing exercise for you. :-)Support the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
Click on this link to find out more.
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Show not tell is an essential part of creative writing.
We all know we need to show not tell, but how exactly do we do that?
Here are some ideas to help you.
Enjoy - and let me know what you think!Support the show
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Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
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Starting a story is great - finishing is even better! In this episode Janet gives 7 tips to help you keep on track and get your story done.
Support the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
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Dialogue isn't like real speech - it takes a lot of work!
Check you aren't making these three common mistakes with dialogue...
And if you find this episode helpful, subscribe to the podcast, and leave a review.
Thank you! :-)Support the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
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Oh, and do leave a review on your podcast app - it really does help a lot. Thank you! :-) -
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Welcome to the Write for a Reason podcast. My name is Janet Wilson; I'm a publisher of Christian fiction for young people with Dernier Publishing. If you are a Christian, and new to writing stories for kids and teens, stay tuned for encouragement, creative writing tips and actionable strategies you can implement immediately to become a better writer, and get your books out into the world.
Today we’re going to be looking at surprises and twists!
These can deepen the emotional impact of your story, which, of course, is a great thing.
Enjoy, then get adding those surprises...
If you’d like lots more free creative writing tips,hop on over to write-for-a-reason.com, where you will find lots more resources and encouragement to help you write excellent, relevant, fun novels and get them into your readers’ hands.
If you haven’t yet done my free course, Gripping Beginnings, you can sign up and start immediately. This will help you grip your readers from the very first page of your story.
Don't put it off – today is a gift to use wisely! Only you can write your book, and if you have been called to write, someone's waiting for it.
Support the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
Click on this link to find out more.
Oh, and do leave a review on your podcast app - it really does help a lot. Thank you! :-) -
Send us a text
Welcome to the Write for a Reason podcast. My name is Janet Wilson; I'm a publisher of Christian fiction for young people with Dernier Publishing. If you are a Christian, and new to writing stories for kids and teens, stay tuned for encouragement, creative writing tips and actionable strategies you can implement immediately to become a better writer, and get your books out into the world.
The best way to approach descriptions
When setting a scene, it's good to begin with a description of the general panorama before getting to the details. For example, if we have a scene in our novel where our characters are on a beach, we should begin our description with the sky, the cliffs behind, and any background noises and smells (e.g. the salty smell of the sea, the cry of the seagulls).
Once our readers have the big picture in their mind, it's time to bring them in a bit closer; people laughing and splashing in the waves, children building sandcastles, a boy throwing a stick for his dog . . .
Finally we need to zoom right in to show the details of our character and the action that takes place in this scene.
If we go straight to our characters and their actions without first giving a broad picture of the scene, readers might have to revise their mental picture, and that's annoying!
If you’d like lots more free creative writing tips,hop on over to write-for-a-reason.com, where you will find lots more resources and encouragement to help you write excellent, relevant, fun novels and get them into your readers’ hands.
If you haven’t yet done my free course, Gripping Beginnings, you can sign up and start immediately. This will help you grip your readers from the very first page of your story.
Don't put it off – today is a gift to use wisely! Only you can write your book, and if you have been called to write, someone's waiting for it.
Support the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
Click on this link to find out more.
Oh, and do leave a review on your podcast app - it really does help a lot. Thank you! :-) -
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Chapters cut your story up into manageable chunks, but there are so many brilliant ways of ending them. The aim is to keep your readers turning the pages because they just have to know what happens next (even after lights out; did you do that? :-)). Even the most desperate of readers may have to break off at some point, and that's usually at a chapter break, so you want to make sure your readers can't wait to get back into the action.
Of course you need a gripping plot and excellent, relevant characters, but the way you set out your chapter endings could make all the difference to your novel's success.
What you really don’t want is a reader to put down your book in the middle, then not pick it up again, because they’re not curious what happens next!So today we will look at some excellent ways to finish your chapters. Some of these you will know intuitively, but some you may not have thought about... come on in and see!
Support the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
Click on this link to find out more.
Oh, and do leave a review on your podcast app - it really does help a lot. Thank you! :-) -
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If you're here, you're writing for a very important reason! Writing Christian books for children is so important.
Even so, there can be days, weeks or even months when you just don't seem to be able to get round to write...
In this podcast episode I give you some ideas on how to get writing fit again!
And if you'd like to join the Write for a Reason Zoom training that I mention, click here to find out more and book your place.
Hope to see you there!
Every blessing,
JanetSupport the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
Click on this link to find out more.
Oh, and do leave a review on your podcast app - it really does help a lot. Thank you! :-) -
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Do you have an author website? Do you wish you did?
Twenty years ago, this wouldn’t have been a thing, but these days every author needs to have a website of some description.
Would you like to know exactly what you need to do and how you need to do it? In really easy steps?
Look no further than today’s episode! My guest, Sonja Anderson, is the perfect person to talk to us about websites for authors, as she is a writer for a reason (just about to have her third children’s book published) and she recently had her website analyzed by the Bluehost server company marketing experts... they gave it a whopping 74 out of 77 points!
There are lots of fancy websites out there – what’s great about Sonja’s is that you see the real Sonja. It’s simple, fun, and reflects who she is. It also contains every element you need... and you can do exactly what she’s done!
So grab your headphones and your writing journal and get ready to make some notes.
Here’s the link to Sonja’s website.
And here’s the link to the free course that Sonja mentions.
Now you have no excuse not to have an author website! :-)
Let me know how you get on, and don’t forget to sign up for Sonja’s free scene cards to cut the plotting overwhelm when writing your story!
See you again soon,
Janet
Support the show
Like to do my free writing course, Gripping Beginnings?
Or perhaps you would like to join our membership group, for support while you write your novel?
Click on this link to find out more.
Oh, and do leave a review on your podcast app - it really does help a lot. Thank you! :-) - Vis mere
