Author: Jacquie Biggar

All of us at WITS do our best to bring you information about every aspect of today’s publishing. Today’s post delves into a unique project, and New York Times bestselling author, Deb Holland, is here to tell you all about it — the good, the bad and the OMG!

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By Debra Holland

The idea of a multi-author anthology set in my bestselling Montana Sky series was born in the Spring of 2013. The prior year, I’d written a collection of short Christmas stories, Montana Sky Christmas, and loved the experience. I had more ideas for Christmas stories and knew I wanted to write a second collection.

The Problem: My deadlines for the year didn’t allow time to add a book of short stories.

One of my long-time favorite authors, Andre Norton, had several multi-author anthologies in her Witch World series. Authors or aspiring authors…

If there was ever a secret to writing, then mastering DEEP POV would be it. It certainly takes time to learn the techniques involved around getting this POV right, but I hear time and time again from editors and publishers that this is the most powerful tool in a writer’s arsenal. Study and delve into it, and ensure you have this secret weapon at the top of your toolbox. As a writer, going DEEP, means you have to go deep inside your character’s head when you tell your story. Every action, reaction, emotion and thought has to be shown as if the character was living and breathing the story, and not the author telling it.

Here are some tips and techniques to aid you in mastering your POV and going Deep.

• In order to keep things in perspective as you write, allow your POV character to guide you through their world.
• Use all the character’s senses to feel, hear, smell, see and taste things.
• Since the character is…

I’ve read thousands of works, and one quick way to have a “paper doll” is for a character to be all good or all evil. When we begin writing, it’s easy to fall into this trap. Our heroes or heroines are versions of ourselves (minus any imperfections, of course). Our bad guys are every ex or person in high school who picked on us. They are evil personified. But then we soon realize?

Our characters are deep as a puddle, making them dull as dirt.

If we look to some of the most fascinating characters in history, books, and movies, we see a cast that includes Riddick (Chronicles of Riddick), Gordon Gekko (Wall Street), Wyatt Earp (history and the movie Tombstone), Tom Sawyer (literature), Annie Wilkes (Misery), Hannibal of Carthage, Hannibal the Cannibal (Silence of the Lambs), Batman, Iron Man, Poison…

Yes, even WANA International is offering a Black Friday special. Cool thing is? No leaving home or getting in a fist-fight…unless you want to. I’ve killed three people this morning (though as writers. it’s ALL legal). I’ve asked Lisa Hall-Wilson to come chat with you guys about a serious sticky-wicket for new writers especially. We need to know what is going on in the minds of characters, but if they go around talking to themselves non-stop? Readers just roll their eyes.

There is a BIG difference between narrative and internal dialogue, and Lisa is here to clear up the confusion!

Take it away!

*throws glitter*

Stephen King wrote in On Writing about the writer’s toolbox. Tools like vocabulary, punctuation, grammar, showing not telling – those all belong in the top level of your toolbox, but lift off that top shelf and there’s a bunch of other tools that are very…