Wednesday links

I love regularly reading tips and advice articles in certain subjects — particularly writing and publishing. I don’t always need the information right then, but I know that it’ll eventually come in handy. Or at least, I hope it will.

I know there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same way I do, but sometimes it can be difficult to find every useful advice article that’s out there. So I thought I’d bring you a few.

Here are the tips and advice articles that jumped out at me the most over the past week.

1. Plotting: How to Know Which Scenes to Include in Your Book, from Jody Hedlund: While it’s impossible to please every reader, you can please most readers by making sure you include the right information in your novel. You don’t want to dwell on unimportant scenes, but you also don’t want to skip over ones that mean something to your story. Excerpt: “We have to narrow down how much of our story and character’s lives we reveal on the page. That means we often have to summarize events or leave them out entirely with the assumption that our readers will piece everything together without having to know every detail.”

2. Why Voice Is Becoming More Important in Today’s Market, from Jody Hedlund: With so many published books out there – and with the high number being published each year – it can be difficult to get a strong foothold in the market. That’s where you’re voice comes in. Excerpt: “An author’s narrative voice is our unique way of stringing words, sentences, and thoughts together that resembles (perhaps echoes) the qualities of our personality, inner being, and values. Some writers develop and hone their voices over time. Others seem to come into writing with a distinct voice already there.”

And a bonus: How Stephen King’s Wife Saved Carrie and Launched His Career, from Mental Floss: There are few people in the world right now who haven’t heard of Carrie, thanks to the movie that was recently released. But the novel it’s based on likely wouldn’t have been published – at least, not as we know it – if it hadn’t been for the help of Stephen King’s wife, Tabby. Excerpt: “When King started, he typed three single-spaced pages, crumpled them up in anger, and dumped them in the trashcan. He was disappointed in himself.”