Contributor
Nick Bailey writes about anything and everything in the realm of writing and publishing. From articles about honing your craft to launching your book, Nick aims to provide valuable insights and practical tips to the NowNovel community in his posts. Aside from stories, Nick enjoys hiking, electronic music, and filling up his personal cookbook with new recipes.
When telling a story, your opening sentence needs to be catchy, so readers continue. The best first lines of books show us the common devices authors use to grab our curiosity. We analyzed 100 New York Times bestsellers' first lines to share the following insights: 1. Introduce interesting ch...
July 9th, 2019
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Google Docs is already a useful free word processor. But these 6 Google Docs add-ons for writers will help you brainstorm, write and revise further: 1. ProWritingAid Billed as being ‘for the smarter writer’, ProWritingAid is a useful suite of editing tools for revising that messy first dra...
June 24th, 2019
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Writing scene beginnings readers find compelling is a useful skill to develop. Here are 5 ways to write strong scene beginnings, with examples: 1. Start scenes with unusual events in motion Scenes that begin with 'business as usual' can be fascinating in their own right, if we tell them in...
June 5th, 2019
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Character tropes (common stock characters) have their place in stories. Satires and spoofs, for example, use types such as the 'cool mom' or 'orphan who must save the world'. Yet character tropes quickly dull a story when characters read as too predictable. To avoid tropes: 1. Know your chara...
March 25th, 2019
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'Motivation' is a word that comes up time and again when we survey readers and members on writing challenges. There may not be a single, exclusive solution for how to find motivation to write. Yet here are 5 ways to stay fired up and on track: 1. Focus on writing tasks that give intrinsic val...
March 14th, 2019
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Character development gives fictional characters depth. Like us, characters grow, change, make mistakes and learn (or don't). Read 9 ways to make your characters grow and take readers on a great character arc: How to take character development deeper: Plan characters' goals and motivation...
February 28th, 2019
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