Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
by Anne R. Allen Finding a beta reader or critique group is essential to any writer’s development. We can’t write in a vacuum. Nobody ever learned to be a good writer holed up in an attic with no one to review his work but the cat. (Cats can be so cruel.) Rachelle Gardner ran […]
by Anne R. Allen I’ve been looking over some of my much-rejected early novels recently and discovered they have something in common with a lot of other unpublished fiction: way too much dialogue. They’re too LOUD. The characters need to shut up already and get on with the story. And yet, in all the […]
by Anne R. Allen In his painfully funny 2006 book, Famous Writing School, a Novel, Stephen Carter’s writing teacher-protagonist advises his students to seek character names in the obituaries. But although Carter’s bumbling protagonist offers mostly dubious advice, that tip is a keeper. Obits are full of great names. I keep a list in a […]
by Anne R. Allen First, completely off topic here, I’d like to say—after stumbling out of bed an hour early and changing the time on all 30 of my clocks, electronic devices and watches—that Daylight Savings Time is WAY more trouble than it used to be, because we all own so many time pieces. […]
by Anne R. Allen Beginning writers love prologues. My first novel had one. I’ll bet yours does too. And why not? Prologues are the quickest way to set the scene and establish the mood and tone of your novel. They allow us to snuggle into a fictional world and get comfy before the action […]
How Long Should A Novel Be? by Anne R. Allen A lot of agents have been complaining about queries with inappropriate word counts recently. If you’re getting a lot of form rejections, this may be why. Today Fineprint agent Colleen Lindsay has posted an update of contemporary word count rules on her great blog, THE […]
There’s been some discussion on other blogs about some of my statements about how publishers label things. Please know I’m just the messenger—I don’t condone those one-size-fits-all categories any more than other writers. Catherine Ryan Hyde, author of Pay it Forward weighed in by directing me to a blogpost in her blog archives about the […]
This is one of my most pirated columns from Inkwell Newswatch. I’ve found copied on dozens of other blogs. (I’m flattered, pirates, as long as you give me attribution.) I wrote it in May of 2005, when I was working for an indie publisher in the UK, now defunct, but the principles remain the same. […]
Anne R Allen’s Blog With Ruth Harris