Approaching Action and elevating tension

Have you ever read a novel that has tons of action, car chases, kidnappings, escapes and gun fights -- that doesn't keep you awake even though it is 10:00am on Saturday and you just finished two pots of coffee? Yeah, that's a common problem with newer writers and one that has some simple fixes. Since friends don't let friends publish crap, here are some of the tactics I use for action.

Erotica of the Mind and Soul

My favorite erotica author has always been Anais Nin. My love affair with her storytelling has never faltered and never strayed. She wrote true erotica, and did it several times without a sex scene.

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings -- of tarnishings.”
― Anaïs Nin

How to become a more persuasive writer

In business, persuasion is a process aimed at changing a person's (or a group's) attitude or behavior toward some event, idea, object, or other person(s), by using written or spoken words to convey information, feelings, or reasoning, or a combination thereof.

 Tips for Aggressively Increasing Your Persuasion Levels

Terms of the Trade

Objective Correlative: a literary term referring to a symbolic article used to provide explicit, rather than implicit, access to such traditionally inexplicable concepts as emotion or color. T.S. Eliot used this phrase to describe “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” that the poet feels and hopes to evoke in the reader.

How to write headlines that convert

You know that — on average —

only 2 out of 10 people read an article beyond the headline, don’t you? If you don’t write irresistible headlines, even fewer will read your content.

How to self-edit so you don’t look dumb

Whether you are a good writer or not doesn’t matter.

Does this surprise you?

The only way to become a master writer is to become awe-inspiringly good at editing. Advertising great David Ogilvy says this:

I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft.