Fiction writing becomes more difficult as more is learned about it. With skill comes awareness. The joy you found when your story first made its presence known in your consciousness — and when you began writing it — dissipates as you re-write. The second, third, fourth and perhaps the fifth draft of your book evokes not only resentment that you must work so hard to produce a saleable novel, but discouragement, frustration, and yes, even boredom. However, the professional author endures the agony, realizing that each re-write clarifies the story and makes it saleable.

THE PURPOSE OF THE FIRST DRAFT OF THE STORY IS:

To “get the story out” — to write everything that the creative sub-conscious churns into being about the original story idea.

To “cement” the main character in the story through a trait that must be modified or expanded by the events (scenes) that impact him.
Because of that trait, to present the “path” the main character must walk in order to reach his goal, and with each sequel (reaction to event) show character growth.

To design the background against which the story will take place.

To define the adversary blocking the character’s path toward goal.

To show the need for sub-characters to help or hinder character’s striving for goal.

THE PURPOSE OF THE SECOND DRAFT OF THE STORY IS:

To “weed out” unnecessary scenes, embellish major scenes that are a vital part of the main thrust of the story and to accentuate the trait preventing the main character from achieving his goal.

To eliminate unnecessary sub-characters.

To tighten sentences, eliminating extraneous words.

To make certain that sequel follows each scene in order — and that the character reacts ONLY to the preceding scene/disaster.

To REFINE DIALOGUE BY:
Eliminating unnecessary conversation.
Strengthening characters through their own words.
Choosing a FOCUS for each conversation.
Making certain that a conversation does not contain information already presented to the reader in narrative or dialogue.

THE PURPOSE OF THE THIRD DRAFT OF THE STORY IS:

While the second draft DISTILLED the story — STRENGTHENED the main thrust, cut away the FAT and aimed toward the CLIMAX, THE THIRD DRAFT exposes the “nitty gritty” words, expositions, reactions and emotional clutter that was not evident until the second draft cleared away the initial debris.

Authors and booksellers — here’s your chance to ask an expert for her advice. Between her years in the business and her contacts, we’re confident that you’ll get an answer!

WHAT DO YOUR SIGNS TELL PEOPLE?

Go outside and look carefully at your signs and see what they are telling people.

Example:

BOOKTRADER

What does this tell you? What is Booktrader? Many people do not recognize from this that you are a bookstore. Consider changing your overhead signs to say something more to the point.

Example:

NEW  AND  USED  BOOKS

Booktrader

This tells people what your business is and then your name. Someone new to the area will immediately identify with the fact that you sell books.

NOW LET’S LOOK AT YOUR WINDOWS

Consider listing what you have in the store.

Example:

ROMANCE     GENERAL  FICTION     READERS  GROUP

LOCAL  AUTHORS’  BOOKS     AUTHOR  SIGNINGS

This tells people the kind of things that can be found in your store. If you put up AUTHOR SIGNINGS, they will be on the look out for who is visiting your store. Next to where you have “AUTHOR SIGNINGS” written, you can leave a space and when you do have an author in your store, you can place a temporary sign with the name, time and date.

Example:

AUTHOR  SIGNING — CONSTANCE  O’BANYON

SATURDAY,  JUNE  15TH,  1 P.M.  TO  4 P.M.

If there is anything unique or special you do in your store, put it on the window. For example, advertise your readers’ group.

FLYERS

Marketing experts tell us that people need to see your name in print seven times for it to be remembered. Flyers are one way to accomplish this for the least amount of money.

I can hear you saying,

“But I don’t have time to deliver flyers.”

BE CREATIVE!

Do you have a customer who walks regularly? If so, offer them a trade for free books to deliver your flyers when they walk. Maybe some of your customers have sons or daughters who are looking for a way to earn a little pocket money. I had a high school student who was eager to earn some extra money — he delivered 2500 flyers for $20.00.

One suggestion — whoever delivers your flyers in the neighborhood, give them a blown-up map of the area you wish to cover and a highlighter pen to mark off the areas covered. You should offer something on your flyer so you will know how many people you have reached.

Example:

BRING  IN  THIS  FLYER  FOR  A  10%  DISCOUNT

1ST  VISIT  ONLY

This way you can track the success of your advertising campaign, but do not be discouraged if you do not have an overwhelming response the first or second time. REMEMBER, the experts say at least seven times is necessary.

Article writing in general

Before we start elaborating on the kinds of articles, we will first define the term. What is an article in the most general sense of the term? The answer is simpler than the question; an article is textual body written with the purpose of giving information to the reader.

Now when we speak about writing an article in general, there is an array of differences between one kind of article and another. There are also various types of articles distinguished according to these differences.

One of them is the language used in the article. An article can be written in a simple easy-to-grasp kind of language when giving information which will be helpful in circumstances happening in everyday life. However, an article written with the purpose to describe scientific phenomena or the article is of scientific content of every kind this kind of articles are written in a more scientific language not graspable to people not really drawn to the field of science described in the article.

Another thing in which articles differ, speaking for all kinds of written articles in general, is the length. When describing an event in the newspapers, the articles are of the length necessary to describe that event from all possible aspects, and in the daily press we usually encounter articles which are not very long, only containing the important highlights of an event because a newspaper is a kind of daily informative press read by people of all ages and occupations and they do not have the time to dedicate a half an hour or so to one article only. The newspaper articles serve to inform the citizen on the daily events from many aspects (business, crime, politics, events on local, regional and global level), plus to entertain the reader by a page of astrology and a crossword puzzle.

Another factor of distinction of the articles is the content. According to their content we have argumentative, cause and effect, comparison and contrast, controversial and persuasive articles.

What a good article writer has to bear in mind when writing articles in general is that the article is an informative text body written with the purpose to inform, learn and entertain the reader.

Article writing for dollars

Now, many of you surely wonder how to earn money by writing articles online. If you do a little research on the web, you will find that there are many websites seeking for the help of bright and gifted writers as you are to enrich the content of their database.

Now the websites are many and it is up to your choice which is going to be the one to earn your trust. When you register as a contributing writer to any website, you should never forget to click on the Terms of Service and read everything under that title. When creating websites everyone writes the text of Terms of Service in small letters in order to be less appealing for the user to look into it. If your privacy has not been respected the way you wished, it will be your fault not to have read the Terms of Service of that website first. They respected the norms by putting that tab when creating the website and your disagreeing with it is your problem.

Now for the payment issues. Every website has established their own way in paying the writers; however, we will state one example which most websites of the kind follow. For someone who writes articles on a daily basis, there is a certain sum of daily bonus which is guaranteed (1 dollar a day for example). And then the sum grows according to the number of times your article was viewed. Therefore, even if your articles are not amusing to anybody (which is far from possible) you will get at least 30 dollars an article each month. Sounds convenient already.

Steps in writing a magazine article

Now, we did not say that getting to write articles for a magazine is easy, it is not even near to easy. The stairway is big, however, we will help you by pointing the crucial steps in writing a magazine article.

First and foremost, if you really want to write articles for a magazine, you have to make sure you choose the magazine you read; the most preferable is your favorite magazine, if you have one. We assure you this is important because since you have constantly read every edition of your favorite magazine, you already know the topics and style that should be incorporated in your writing. If you are not a car lover, you cannot apply to write articles for car magazines because no matter how much time you will dedicate to your research on the subject, it will never be as successful as it would be when writing for something that really is included in your scope of interests.

Next thing you should do is get and follow the writer’s guideline for the magazine you want to write about, and then send a query letter to the magazine, of course if they stated there is a need of such thing. This should be a brief letter to the manager where you state the main outlook on the article you wrote hoping to get an answer whether it is something the magazine really needs.

The next step is in sending out your copy. Remember, being tactful is more than preferable when this comes to question, therefore it is a wise thing to send queries about the same article to various magazines, but send the copy of your article only to one of them. There is nothing more irritating for an editor than going through your article thinking about whether to buy it or not, for later to find out that you have sold it someplace else.

Writing academic article

However, it takes much resourcefulness and knowledge on the subject you are going to write about if you want your academic article to be written the most preferable way. We will provide a simple guideline on how to successfully write your academic article. These are just some main points which will guide you in the right direction.

First thing you need to do is find out what to write about. If you do not have an assigned topic but it was left to your choice, find your topic in the field the most appealing to write about (at least in your opinion, because an academic article is not writing about what people are most interested in but by writing an academic article on a topic most appealing to you will show your skills in doing thorough research and elaborating on the points which are the most important for that field).

Now, first you need to do is choose the topic and after you have done that you can relax and do a research on the subject you are going to be writing about, as thorough as possible, because the more you find out on a subject, the more you realize what is the most important to mention. An even wiser step is reading academic articles on the subject and you freshen up your memory on what was the most important about the topic you chose.

Then you will have to ask for information about what an accepted version of an academic article should look like for that specific publication. After you have done all that, you can start writing and hope for the best.

Fast article writing

One very popular technique is free writing which is also called stream of consciousness technique. You get the title and you write continuously without a pause everything that comes up on your mind on the subject for 15 minutes.

Then, you do the editing if what you have written and the task is completed. However, not everyone can speed up their writing by this activity. What if we tell you that there is a new way out and that a 400-word article can be completed in 20 minutes. You want to know how? Read further.

Begin with making the list where you write down the ideas and keep that list near you until the end of your writing. Pick the ideas worth writing in your article the most and elaborate on them. If you are typing the article on your computer, type the ideas you want to elaborate on the most in the browser and use the database and write down almost simultaneously. This can be made possible if you keep on writing as long as you have the ideas flowing and when the ideas stop, take a glance at the internet source and move on. You do not have to read the entire database unit, only 3 sentences will help you make an entire paragraph. Do not waste your time reading data you already know. Seek the yet unfamiliar pieces of information through the text and use them wisely.

Of course you should take some things in consideration before trying this out. First and foremost, we are talking about article writers who write in their mother tongue; if you are not a native speaker of the language you are writing the article in, this will take you a long way. Finally, this is possible if you are familiar with the subject writing about, yet you are missing some facts; if you write about a phenomenon you know nothing about, you better spend an hour in research and then practice this quick-writing technique.

Article writing prompts

Using prompts is perfect when you want to do something more than practice your writing strategy. Using prompts will freshen up and beautify your writing and your article will catch the eyes of many curious readers. If you are a person fed up with the same old way of beginning an article, the prompts will definitely make your article stick out from the pile.

Now if you have never used writing prompts when preparing your article, we will help you get used to them easily and make them become a significant part of all of your writing tasks.

In order to get accustomed to them, you will have to practice working with them every day. Use one prompt each day and see what your creativity can do with it, use one prompt and write for about 15 minutes without a pause. You will see whether this kind of writing is good for you.

These prompts are very good when a writing block comes to question. You can break that block through by the help of these prompts which you can find or you can create them yourself when in a better writing condition.

Now when you are the one to create the prompts, make sure you write about areas not explored in full by other writers. Every time you find or come up with an interesting prompt, write it down. When you will have writing issue or lack of inspiration, that list of prompts written down might be of great help.

This kind of writing helper has been used in many purposes and even teachers have been presenting this method to help students who find writing assignments hard to fulfill. If a child can use them, so can an experienced writer.

Freelance article writing for magazines

A writer obtaining all these privileges as mentioned above has to possess exceptional qualities in the field of journalism, and by this we mean that a successful freelance magazine writer has to possess these qualities at least: a freelance magazine writer has to possess a wide scope of interest and knowledge in many topics and has to be very skillful and efficient in doing the research on the subject he/she is going to write about.

One thing by which you can see whether the writer is an amateur or not is the thing they most dedicate their time for when writing an article. If a writer spends 50 per cent of the time needed to complete the article in a research about the article, then we are not really talking about an experienced and efficient writer. It is the same as it is if a linguist spends most of the time looking for unfamiliar words in a dictionary. We do not say that thorough research is not important; it is a very crucial part of the work of every journalist, yet an experienced writer knows where to seek materials for the new article and an inexperienced one is feeling lost on the world of the web database.

Being a successful freelance writer has some perks of its own. Being efficient in your job will open many doors in the future. For starters, it is enough to do remarkably well in freelance article writing for one magazine. After the audience sees the quality you possess, you will not have to send out your works to other magazines, people from other magazines will seek you because writing freelance articles for one magazine has already helped you advertise your work and catch the eyes of many magazine editors.

Article writing with introduction

Every teacher that has the job of evaluating writing assignments has his/her secret in successfully grading 180 texts in two weeks all by themselves. How can they possibly do that? They say that from the first five sentences, they determine whether the text (an essay, article or any other kind of writing, irrespectively) is good enough to pass or not. Yes, your editor uses the same strategy. When they are lucky, the editors find the time to thoroughly revise your article, however, if they see from the first five sentences that something is wrong, they know they will have a really difficult job.

A good introduction is something crucial for the success of your article. It is the first impression your article leaves on the reader and what all of us have noticed from our life experience is that a good first impression was that thing which helped us through many situations.

A good introduction will make perfectly clear on the topic the article is going to be about, if you want to make your readers curious about the content of the article, emphasize the main topics you are going to discuss further in the body of the article. Do not narrate the article in your introduction because it will not be interesting to read it afterwards.

About the language, it should be really easily comprehensible for at least 99 per cent of the reading audience. Even if you have to use some specific terminology in the text, the introduction is not a good place for that at all. Maybe your article will be used in academic purposes, but you should also think that it should have the purpose of spicing up a morning coffee séance in the comfort of the reader’s home. The aim of your article is to inform, but also to entertain, therefore if you point this out in your introduction, you will get great audience and loyal reading fans.