Art & Craft of Writing: Secret Advice for Writers
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About this ebook
Mixon's most popular posts on her award-winning writing blog, A. Victoria Mixon, Editor are now available for the first time in her new book, Secret Advice for Writers.
Mixon's blog is a Top 10 Blog for Writers, Top 20 Blog for Writers, and Writer's Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers, with over a million views. She has headlined for Writer Unboxed alongside Chuck Sambuchino of Writer's Digest and top author on writing and literary agent Donald Maass. Her blog posts currently appear monthly in Fiction Southeast literary magazine. Mixon teaches through Writer's Digest and the San Francisco Writers Conference.
"Secret Advice for Writers is the very crux of what I have to teach about our wonderful art and craft: the secret advice behind all the work I do."--Mixon
Get Secret Advice for Writers and sign up inside for her email list, Art & Craft of Writing, to receive your exclusive free copy of her second blog collection, Favorite Advice for Writers.
Victoria Mixon
Victoria Mixon is a professional writer and editor and has worked in fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and technical documentation for over thirty years. She co-authored the nonfiction Children and the Internet: A Zen Guide for Parents and Educators, published by Prentice Hall in 1996, for which she is listed in the Who’s Who of America. Her first book on writing, The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual, is one of the elite handful recommended by Preditors & Editors. Her second book on writing, The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner's Manual, has been praised on video by Kindle #1 bestseller Stu Wakefield. Her blog, A. Victoria Mixon, Editor, has been voted one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers and a Writer's Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers. She has been invited to teach fiction through Writer's Digest and the San Francisco Writers Conference.
Read more from Victoria Mixon
Art & Craft of Writing Fiction: First Writer's Manual Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art & Craft of Writing Stories: Second Writer's Manual Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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Art & Craft of Writing - Victoria Mixon
Victoria Mixon
Copyright copyright 2015 by Victoria Mixon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. Art & Craft of Writing Fiction™, La Favorita Press™, and the La Favorita graphic are trademarks of La Favorita Press. All other trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners.
victoriamixon.com
Published by La Favorita Press
ISBN 978-1-944227-04-3
Art & Craft of Writing
Art & Craft of Writing: Secret Advice for WritersArt & Craft of Writing: Favorite Advice for WritersSign up to get your free books on writing!
FREE BOOKSArt & Craft of Writing
Art & Craft of Writing FictionArt & Craft of Writing StoriesBuy it. I recommend it.
—Preditors & Editors
Mixon is brilliant. These are the lessons of a writing lifetime.
—Roz Morris, bestselling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel
artandcraftofwriting.com
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
6 Golden Rules for Life as a Writer
BECOMING A WRITER
Chapter 1: 10 Things to Do to Become a Better Writer in 10 Days
BEGINNING TO WRITE
Chapter 2: 9 Ways to Find Time to Write
Chapter 3: 4 Essential Notes to Post Over Our Desks
Chapter 4: 2 Steps to Launching Headfirst into Writing
Chapter 5: 5 Pickles to Write Ourselves Into
WAYS TO MAKE OUR NOVELS
Chapter 6: 5 Ways to Make a Novel Inescapable
Chapter 7: 5 Ways to Make a Novel Helplessly Addictive
Chapter 8: 5 Ways to Make Our Novels Unforgettable
PERSONALITY TYPES OF WRITERS
Chapter 9: 6 Personality Types Who Will Fail as Writers
Chapter 10: 6 Personality Types Who Will Succeed as Writers
CONCLUSION
Life as a Writer in the Real World
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Art & Craft of Writing Series
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Introduction
6 Golden Rules for Life as a Writer
The real & the imaginary
It was 2009 and the blogosphere was in its first blush of youth when I started my blog on writing for my new independent editing business: Victoria Mixon, Editor & Author. My husband had been listening to a lot of talk about fiction over the dinner table for many years and was ready to make something happen with it.
So we did.
Now six years later, the blogosphere is an ambitious young adult in the prime of life with thousands upon thousands of blogs on writing by both professionals and amateurs.
The way in which we all use the Internet has altered drastically. Blogging—which was once just a type of journaling with photos, shared with any stranger interested—has morphed into a sophisticated form of communication more similar to the pamphleting of the 1800s than the daily captain’s ‘logs’ after which weblogging was originally named.
Many bloggers have found ways to make blogging their livelihoods, even in a world of increasingly urgent bells and whistles.
Many bloggers have cashed in their chips in the blogosphere and gone back to three-dimensional reality.
And I have now a collection of my most-popular blog posts containing the most essential things I know about fiction.
Unfortunately, these blog posts are buried in the hundreds and hundreds of posts that I’ve written over the years, so nobody but me knows they’re the most popular and get the most views.
Until now. . .
Welcome to my secret writer’s advice!
Together, these pieces have earned the majority of the approximately one million views of my blog to date. This is the very crux of what I have to teach about our wonderful art and craft: the secret advice behind all the work I do.
Thank you, all of you, who have made this such an exciting six years to be a blogger.
Thank you, everyone, who has read and commented.
And thank you, especially, to those special people with whom I’ve worked on their manuscripts: my beloved editing clients.
1. We’re not supposed to take it too seriously
If you only learn one thing about writing right now from me or ever from anyone, learn this: it’s meant to be fun.
It’s meant to be creative.
It’s meant to be about stretching our wings.
It is not meant to destroy our lives—it’s