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    Get It Write!
    Get It Write!
    Get It Write!
    Ebook87 pages1 hour

    Get It Write!

    By Margaret Evans

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    About this ebook

    Get It Write! offers 50 tips to help writers achieve their writing success. It provides ideas and suggestions for researching and writing features stories and articles, fiction and non-fiction books, journals and memoirs, and writing for children and young adult.
    The book helps writers understand the importance of knowing their strengths, the expectations of their readers, how to get organized, and ways to overcome writer's block. It gives ideas on how to get going with a writing project which can sometimes be surprisingly challenging. It helps writers organize their research and understand how to conduct meaningful interviews whether they are for feature articles, non-fiction books or as material for a fiction story. It helps writers understand the impact and role of anecdotes in non-fiction writing.
    Fiction has its special challenges with a beginning, a muddle, and an ending. The book helps writers develop their plot through their characters and the need to have a full personality profile of each character's strengths and weaknesses. Those characters start out on a quest, struggle through the muddle in the middle, and emerge unscathed but all the more emotionally richer at the end, taking the reader with them on roller-coaster ride. The tips in the book help writers define what is at stake, and addresses pacing, setting, the use of dialogue, and the importance of narrative.
    The book defines the difference between a memoir and an autobiography and addresses the legal issues when including real people. In writing for children, the book looks at theme, structure, plot, characters, and the special needs of writing dialogue for young readers.
    The book stresses the importance of planning for promotion and marketing even before the book is written and helps writers develop strategies for both. With the rapid growth in ebooks and print on demand books, there has never been a better time to get published. But with that comes the essential need to understand marketing planning and strategy.
    Everyone has a story to tell. The ancient desire to reach out and share a tale of wonder or fantasy is embedded in the fabric of the human condition. Every story is a unique expression, a tale told in a moment of time. Each story uniquely defines who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we relate to our world. Get It Write! helps writers with tips, ideas and encouragement to share their stories with the world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMargaret Evans
    Release dateJul 23, 2013
    ISBN9780968521335
    Get It Write!
    Author

    Margaret Evans

    I was born in England and came to Canada in 1969. I have been a writer/journalist and author for over 40 years and have published four books. I am also a photographer. Since my last book Heart of a Hoofbeat was published, I have expanded into public speaking which I support with multimedia shows. Clips of my videos can be seen on my website www.earthwaysmedia.com. I live with my family on an acreage in Chilliwack B.C. where I have five horses, two dogs and a cat.

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      Book preview

      Get It Write! - Margaret Evans

      GET IT WRITE!

      50 Tips to Help with your Writing Success

      By Margaret Evans

      Also by Margaret Evans

      To Conserve a Heritage

      You’re All Grown Up, Vancouver

      Zoofolk

      Heart of a Hoofbeat

      GET IT WRITE!

      50 Tips to Help with your Writing Success

      By Margaret Evans

      Copyright 2013 by Margaret Evans

      Published in 2013 by Earthways Media Limited, Chilliwack, British Columbia.

      Smashwords Edition

      License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Evans, Margaret, 1944-

      Get It Write /Margaret Evans

      ISBN 978-0-9685213-3-5

      To Michelle, Kennie and Jonathan

      With endless love and thanks

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Preface

      Introduction

      Before You Start

      Article and Feature Writing

      Non-Fiction Book Writing

      Fiction Story Writing

      Journals, Memoirs, Autobiographies

      Writing for Children and Teenagers

      Marketing and Promotion

      Epilogue

      About Margaret Evans

      PREFACE

      In over 40 years of writing, one of the questions I have always found hard to answer is How do you write?

      Writing for me was instinctive from a very early age. I remember the first article I wrote. It was about the evolution of horses. I went to the local library to find the information then handwrote the story on six pieces of paper torn from my school exercise book. I was eight years old and it was for my Mom.

      My writing career really started after I emigrated from England to Canada with my family in 1969. My husband and I were in our early 20s and our daughter was under two. I was working as a secretary which was never completely satisfying as I felt my career path was going in the wrong direction. I wanted to write.

      Even though writing was instinctive to me, I quickly found that freelance writing wasn’t as easy as I thought. Sometimes the words would come easily and the sentences flowed. But at other times it could be truly frustrating. The right words, and the right meaning of the words, would be stuck on some internal pathway on the edge of consciousness and just wouldn’t surface. You know they are there. You can sense them. They will flash for a second then subside. But I learned to tease those words out with a few tricks in a writer’s mental toolkit to get the project to move forward.

      Then something happened that took writing to a deeper level for me. It was August 1983. We were living in Fort Langley, British Columbia. I had re-married and Tom and I were busy raising three children (two from my previous marriage) on an acreage where we had a pony and two dogs.

      It was a hot, dry day and I had decided to do something about the crop of zucchini in the vegetable garden that was threatening to grow into jungle status. Knowing there was only so many times I could serve zucchini sticks to the kids, I decided to make marmalade. It is actually more appetizing than it sounds.

      Making the marmalade was easy. To seal the jars, I melted some paraffin wax in a double boiler. While waiting for it to melt, I made the mistake of diverting my attention to re-reading a draft of an article I had been working on earlier in the day.

      A crackling sound coming from the kitchen caught my attention. To my horror the double boiler had caught fire. Grabbing the scalding handle, I raced to the back door to get the pot outside where the water hose lay. But the breeze fanned the flames into my face, arms and torso. Being summer, I was only wearing a sun suit and my bare shoulders, arms and legs took the brunt of the flame. Even my hair was on fire.

      I remember calling my doctor. Paramedics arrived. I was rushed to hospital where I was treated for second and third degree burns. Nurses came and went. Tom rushed from work to be with me. I would need isolation to prevent infection, salt baths, and pain management. And I would need skin grafting on my left arm. Two weeks later I was in the Vancouver General Hospital’s Burn Unit.

      The pain was excruciating. There’s nothing like burn pain, not even childbirth. And beyond the pain was the fear, the terrible, uncontrollable fear. If something so simple could go so horribly wrong, what about next time? I knew I would never leave the kitchen again with something on the stove but my confidence had been hammered.

      At the Burn Unit, the skin grafting went well and physiotherapy helped to restore movement in my arm. For months I would wear a compression burn sleeve to control the growth of scarring. The skin for the grafting had been taken from my inner thigh and that surgery, which was just as painful

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