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SCENE 28: Scene Length
30 Days to a Stronger Scene Table of Contents Featured Today in Fiction Notes Stores Best Length for Scenes? What’s the best length for a scene? IS there a best length? In his book, Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing, action/adventure author, David Morrell (creator of the Rambo character, among others), says he tries to…
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Do You Make This Basic Story Mistake?
When Stories Start to Go Wrong! Here are some descriptions of manuscripts. Read them and figure out what’s wrong: 6000 word, ABC book 13,000 word middle grade 250,000 YA/teen novel 2000 word YA poetry book 4000 word picture book Match Audience with Length and Format of Your Story In each of these cases, the format,…
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STOP! Cut Picture Book Mss by 1/3
Stop! Before you send out that picture book manuscript, cut it by at least one-third. Really. Make that revision. Biggest Mistake in Picture Book Manuscripts I recently read a picture book manuscript from a novice writer and it had the usual problem: too long. In a picture book manuscript, every word counts, so you must…
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Manuscript Length
How Firm are Book Publisher’s Guidelines on Picture Book Length? I had a question come up last week: how hard and fast are the rules about the length of a picture book manuscript? Can you get by with 1900 words? 2000 words? 2500 words? The length requirements for every genre, from picture books to easy…
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Picture Books: Those Confusing 32 Pages
I got this comment and thought it needed to be a separate post: Tamar Asks: 32 pages? Not clear Hi, Thank you for your posts. They have been very helpful. It isn’t clear to me from your posting of a 32 page book being standard, how many pages of text that translates into for the…
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Write the First Draft of a Picture Book
Write a Story To write the first draft of a picture book text, just write a story. That’s is. Just like you would normally write any story. Keep in mind that you want it to be short and you’ll leae visual details to the illustrator, but, otherwise, write the story. Don’t Worry About These 3…