Writers Remedies

An unmissable thriller will be free on Amazon scheduled on Sunday April 27 2014. Charles J Harwood’s The Shuttered Room is an unforgettable thriller about abduction. Read more about this free thriller below. Free Thriller on Kindle on Sunday April 13 2014 Little do they know their captive holds a deadly secret. Link to Book on Amazon Jess is taken hostage and incarcerated in an upstairs room by three thugs demanding a huge ransom from her rich father. In a bid to escape, she cuts a hole in the bedroom floor with a cutlery knife. From there, Jess observes the three of them going about their everyday business. That’s when she starts playing games with them. That’s when her spying pulls her into a treacherous psychological game with her abductors. If only they knew what their captive was up to. What would they do to her?                        ...

I love writing thrillers, but writing screenplay thrillers has a different type of thrill, as only the action and dialogue are permitted in the script, not the inner thoughts of the characters. Having written four psychological thrillers to date, have now published their equivalent screenplays on Amazon. Screenplay Thrillers on Kindle My four thrillers, The Shuttered Room, Falling Awake, Nora and A Hard Lesson are available on Kindle, Nook, paperback and large print. But now their screenplay adaptations are also available on Amazon. The Shuttered Room and A Hard Lesson were originally conceived as novels, and adapted into screenplays. Falling Awake and Nora were conceived  from screenplays and fleshed out into novels. Having enjoyed writing the screenplay versions, have now published all four screenplays on Kindle, as well as paperback. Formatting screenplays for Kindle is not possible so had to think about the reader experience. Character cue was made bold , actio...

A book promoting tool, Amazon’s Countdown Deals is an extra way of getting your book discovered on Amazon. Not only will you be able to earn bigger royalties on your book for a smaller selling price, but also have your book included on a high viewing webpage. What is Kindle Countdown Deals? How to do Countdown Deal with Amazon Simply put, countdown deals is a selling tool authors can use to control the discount price of books for a given period of time. But how can the writer use Kindle’s countdown deals to promote books? Well, let’s start from the beginning. Firstly, you have to have an account with KDP Amazon self publishing platform, with kindle books listed. Secondly, you have to be enrolled with KDP Select . Explained in more detail in another article, KDP Select is an Amazon selling tool for authors to increase discoverability of books on Kindle. Your book can be borrowed by customers who are enrolled within the Amazon Prime membership program to gain access to t...

Making writing flow entails finding new ways of beginning sentences. A piece of writing comprising sentences that begin in the same way soon becomes repetitive. There are more ways to begin a sentence than pronouns and character names. So, how else can the author begin a sentence, and by the way, what is a pronoun? Beginning Sentences with Pronouns and Character Names There is more than one way of beginning a sentence than with a person’s name or its pronoun. A pronoun by the way is the equivalent for a noun. Pronouns include: he, she, it, they, them. A pronoun to be particularly beware of is ‘it’. Too many ‘its’ will dilute the feeling of the writing and sounds weak. Take a look at the piece of writing to see how repeatedly beginning sentences in this way can soon take the life out of the story. Boring Ways to Begin Sentences in Stories “Vince turned to the coat hanger. He scooped up his coat and placed it over his shoulders. He gazed soberly ahead. Nancy stifled an u...

The first scene of any novel is arguably the hardest or most crucial part of the story. If that first scene doesn’t grip the reader within its maws, the fickle butterfly that is the reader will just flitter off to another more interesting flower head. For this reason, the first scene as well as the first chapter of my novel will go through more draughts than the rest of the story. Boring First Scenes in Novels Tips to Hook the Reader Personally, I find huge blocks of unbroken paragraphs within the opening of a novel a bit of a turn off. Unless the genre is of a special kind, breaks in paragraphs with speeches, action and a smattering of description might offer more of a visual enticement. Lots of description can slow the pace and could cost the author a reader. So, avoid too much description. Similarly, avoid too much setting up. I dislike reading several pages only to realize nothing has happened. This causes me to skip the latter pages and then either read the end or...

Good use of attributives in novels will help make the novel a better read. Action is also a good substitute for attributives in novel writing. A beginner’s mistake is to keep on using said in speech after each person has spoken. Another problem is using a close alternative that feels contrived. A good idea is to think about how the speech was delivered or to use action to assign who is speaking.                                     Bad Use of Attributive Speech in Novel Writing There is little worse in a novel than to read a to-ing and fro-ing of exchanges between two characters where the author simply puts, ‘he said’, ‘she said’ after each has spoken. See this example: ‘I heard about Dawn the other day,’ Lily said. ‘Yes. She got sacked from that job at the chemists’ didn’t she?’ Susan said. ‘It was...

Getting readers’ attention in novels is never easy, but I like to surprise the reader by throwing in unexpected words within prose. I do this by lulling a reader into a certain mood within the story and then to throw in a displaced word. the mood might be soft, exotic or elevated. Soft sounding words might be used such as silk, acquisition or cologne. And then, pow, you put in the word gag or smack or garbage within the mix. See my video clip on making your writing stand out with contrasting words                                                       Rude and Polite Words Together Lots of opportunities for creating contrast in literature can be used, for instance, a protagonist who thinks inappropriate thoughts ...

Have completed my novel Nora, a free thriller available on my blog. In doing so, have learned a lot about this strange medium of the book blog. Firstly, my writing has become more disciplined, as an audience was out there, waiting for the next installment. This helped motivate me to writing every day. But there are pros and cons to writing a story on a blog. The Pros of Fiction Blogging Click to read my book blog by Charles J Harwood Firstly I wanted to get my book out there, in more ways than on merely Amazon, Smashwords and Google books. I wanted to reach more readers than ever. Getting more readers is a good thing for any author, even if the reader gets the book for free, for giveaways often lead to sales. I also feel more comfortable giving my book away than tying myself up with Amazon’s KDP Select, which permits a free giveaway a few days per 90 days. KDP select also prohibits publication in digital format of your book anywhere else on the Web. The Experience of ...