Yearly Archives: 2008

Techniques of the Selling Writer

Dwight V. Swain is the author of Techniques of the Selling Writer, a remarkable book on novel writing in that it breaks down the novel into small, easily-understood and well-explained pieces. These pieces and their structure, if well applied, will lead to a gripping tale that is difficult to put down. Here is my mindmapped […]

Just in Case

In case you’re chomping at the bit for November 1 (or even if you’re a tiny bit scared that it’s almost here). I was trying to get ahead on critiquing in an online forum that I belong to and came across  a neat template for examing a piece of writing that might provide people another […]

Notes from the novel prep workshop

Here we are with less than one week before the start of NaNoWriMo–is your novel preparation complete? While there are those who prefer to plunge into November without much if any preparation, I definitely fall into the camp of people who needs the structure and planning to be in place. Otherwise I find I spend […]

Come out tonight to Barnes and Noble

Our final October preparatory workshop is tonight at the downtown Naperville Barnes and Noble (up in the cafe in the second floor). Joe (Corrupted_Flame) and I will be hosting the event. What do we have planned? Well, I wish I could say we have everything planned to a T but the truth is that this […]

More from the second prep session

I was at the “plot table” the whole session and from the reactions of the participants, I think our exercise was a great success. Here’s what we did (you can try this at home with some of your writing buddies; in fact, we can do some of it in our Illinois::Naperville forum, though online written […]

Second Prep Session – Still Time to Get Involved

We had our second preparation meeting on 10/18/08 at Panera, where one table focused on plot, one on characters, and one on description, and then we mixed it up a bit. Details are available at our wiki page for the Oct 18th session If you missed this, don’t worry. There’s still time to get ready […]

TribLocal story on NaNoWriMo

Patti Murphy is a reporter for www.triblocal.com, the online and locally distributed Tribune magazine (comes out on Thursdays). She attended our kick-off and wrote this story about NaNoWriMo and our chapter. Take a look. –Tim