The Lazy Man’s Guide To Great Characterization
Posted by Buy essay Blog | Uncategorized | Posted on June 20th, 2009
One subject arising whenever writers gather to discuss their craft is the mining of life itself for story material. While a vital and important technique, it is important to remember that real human beings are impossibly complex, far too complicated to serve as story characters without major modification. The most complex character in all of western fiction (arguably), Hamlet, is still only 1% as complex as a real human being.
One must remember that there is a unity between character and plot: they are, in essence, two sides of a single coin. Plot is what a character does in a given situation. A plot must empty a character out, give us everything we need to know about the lead, or the story situation hasn’t been thought through very well.
In life, it is reasonable to take the position that we are what we do. True, this is not ALL that we are, but what we do is closer to this essence than what we “think” we are, or what others define us as. Everyone knows that we judge each other on our actions, and it is childish to pretend otherwise.
We learn to characterize by formulating a theory of human nature, and then testing it against the people around us–our family and friends. You should be prepared to defend this theory in conversation and literary debate. After all, there are only two basic questions being addressed in all of fiction:
1) What is it to be human?
2) What is the ethical structure of the universe?
Whatever your own theory is, you should understand it from every direction, and be able to apply it to understand your own strengths and weaknesses.
Look at the three major areas of human life: body, mind, and spirit. What does your body say about you? Believe me, it says worlds about your values, discipline, emotional health, habit patterns and more. What does your career say about you? Are you operating at full efficiency there? Do you complain about money troubles, but not do anything about it? Do you dream, but not perform? Or are you working at a job that you would continue to do even if you won the lottery? To me, this is a major sign of an active, healthy intellect–the ability to do for a living that which you would do for free.
What about your relationship with your husband/wife/significant other? To me, this is where you reveal yourself most clearly. You ARE your partner, flipped upside-down and inside out. If you like what you see across the breakfast table from you, great. If not, you have work to do. Remember: whoever you see over there was the best you could do. If you could have gotten someone smarter, handsomer/prettier, emotionally healthier–you would have. So take a hard look. Often, you can learn more from a person’s partner than you can from meeting the person.
Viewed in this way, there is a lifetime of study in understanding the people around us, and in understanding ourselves as well. And a lifetime of potential stories in examining how people’s flaws and gaps keep them from achieving their full potential. It can be painful to look at this stuff, but the only thing even more painful is being terminally untrue to your own spirit. That, my friends, is a true tragedy. Better the pain of awareness than the agony of self-betrayal. By a long shot.
The Lazy Man’s Guide To Great Characterization
Posted by Buy essay Blog | Uncategorized | Posted on June 20th, 2009
One subject arising whenever writers gather to discuss their craft is the mining of life itself for story material. While a vital and important technique, it is important to remember that real human beings are impossibly complex, far too complicated to serve as story characters without major modification. The most complex character in all of western fiction (arguably), Hamlet, is still only 1% as complex as a real human being.
One must remember that there is a unity between character and plot: they are, in essence, two sides of a single coin. Plot is what a character does in a given situation. A plot must empty a character out, give us everything we need to know about the lead, or the story situation hasn’t been thought through very well.
In life, it is reasonable to take the position that we are what we do. True, this is not ALL that we are, but what we do is closer to this essence than what we “think” we are, or what others define us as. Everyone knows that we judge each other on our actions, and it is childish to pretend otherwise.
We learn to characterize by formulating a theory of human nature, and then testing it against the people around us–our family and friends. You should be prepared to defend this theory in conversation and literary debate. After all, there are only two basic questions being addressed in all of fiction:
1) What is it to be human?
2) What is the ethical structure of the universe?
Whatever your own theory is, you should understand it from every direction, and be able to apply it to understand your own strengths and weaknesses.
Look at the three major areas of human life: body, mind, and spirit. What does your body say about you? Believe me, it says worlds about your values, discipline, emotional health, habit patterns and more. What does your career say about you? Are you operating at full efficiency there? Do you complain about money troubles, but not do anything about it? Do you dream, but not perform? Or are you working at a job that you would continue to do even if you won the lottery? To me, this is a major sign of an active, healthy intellect–the ability to do for a living that which you would do for free.
What about your relationship with your husband/wife/significant other? To me, this is where you reveal yourself most clearly. You ARE your partner, flipped upside-down and inside out. If you like what you see across the breakfast table from you, great. If not, you have work to do. Remember: whoever you see over there was the best you could do. If you could have gotten someone smarter, handsomer/prettier, emotionally healthier–you would have. So take a hard look. Often, you can learn more from a person’s partner than you can from meeting the person.
Viewed in this way, there is a lifetime of study in understanding the people around us, and in understanding ourselves as well. And a lifetime of potential stories in examining how people’s flaws and gaps keep them from achieving their full potential. It can be painful to look at this stuff, but the only thing even more painful is being terminally untrue to your own spirit. That, my friends, is a true tragedy. Better the pain of awareness than the agony of self-betrayal. By a long shot.
The Perils And Pitfalls Of Publishing: Who Can An Author Trust?
Posted by Buy essay Blog | Uncategorized | Posted on June 19th, 2009
One out of every eight people call themselves a writer, which means there are roughly 24 million people in the United States who carry that banner. Unfortunately there are charlatans and scam artists just waiting to ambush the unsuspecting author. How can a novice writer protect themselves?
Anyone can call themselves a publisher. Always remember money flows towards the author from the publisher, not the other way round.
What to look out for:
Charges the author a fee up front, to have their book accepted, considered or read. These fees are sometimes called a reading fee, intake fee or administrative fee.
Directs authors toward specific editing services or gives authors’ names to these services, with the caveat that if the author hires the editing service, their book will be published. Every book needs editing. It is part of the publisher’s job to provide that editing at no cost.
Offers a contract where the author has to pay for part of the publishing costs. The acquisition editor will sometimes say that the publisher’s list is full for that season, but the author’s book has so much going for it, they would still like to publish it. However the publisher’s resources are fully committed and the author will have to share in the costs.
Some publishers offer contracts that are unfair, such as they obtain rights that should remain with the author of the work.
Some publishers’ contracts contain a clause that if the author says anything negative about the publisher, there is a monetary fine.
There are also publishers who hold the rights for a lengthy time period, regardless of whether the book is still in print or selling.
The publisher doesn’t disclose they are a Publish on Demand (POD), or vanity/subsidy publisher. There is nothing wrong with an author using a subsidy/vanity publishing company as long as the author is well aware of the disadvantages. Publish on Demand books are not, as a rule, stocked by bookstores.
Some POD publishers will insist that their books are available in book stores, as a way to get around this issue. Available is not the same thing as stocked. Available only means the book can be ordered through the bookstore. Since the majority of books sold, are stocked and sold by bookstores, this situation puts a damper on sales.
What else can a writer do to check if a publisher is legitimate?
Go to the local bookstore and see if any of the publisher’s titles are stocked. Ask the manager if necessary.
Search the Internet using the publisher’s name plus the word ‘scam’ or ‘complaint.’
A publisher’s website is targeted to its customers. If the website promotes the books they’ve published that’s a good sign.
If the website is focused on recruiting writers, that’s a bad sign.
Go to forums or bulletin boards that are for writers and see what the authors who have published with the publisher you’re considering have to say about their experience.
The Perils And Pitfalls Of Publishing: Who Can An Author Trust?
Posted by Buy essay Blog | Uncategorized | Posted on June 19th, 2009
One out of every eight people call themselves a writer, which means there are roughly 24 million people in the United States who carry that banner. Unfortunately there are charlatans and scam artists just waiting to ambush the unsuspecting author. How can a novice writer protect themselves?
Anyone can call themselves a publisher. Always remember money flows towards the author from the publisher, not the other way round.
What to look out for:
Charges the author a fee up front, to have their book accepted, considered or read. These fees are sometimes called a reading fee, intake fee or administrative fee.
Directs authors toward specific editing services or gives authors’ names to these services, with the caveat that if the author hires the editing service, their book will be published. Every book needs editing. It is part of the publisher’s job to provide that editing at no cost.
Offers a contract where the author has to pay for part of the publishing costs. The acquisition editor will sometimes say that the publisher’s list is full for that season, but the author’s book has so much going for it, they would still like to publish it. However the publisher’s resources are fully committed and the author will have to share in the costs.
Some publishers offer contracts that are unfair, such as they obtain rights that should remain with the author of the work.
Some publishers’ contracts contain a clause that if the author says anything negative about the publisher, there is a monetary fine.
There are also publishers who hold the rights for a lengthy time period, regardless of whether the book is still in print or selling.
The publisher doesn’t disclose they are a Publish on Demand (POD), or vanity/subsidy publisher. There is nothing wrong with an author using a subsidy/vanity publishing company as long as the author is well aware of the disadvantages. Publish on Demand books are not, as a rule, stocked by bookstores.
Some POD publishers will insist that their books are available in book stores, as a way to get around this issue. Available is not the same thing as stocked. Available only means the book can be ordered through the bookstore. Since the majority of books sold, are stocked and sold by bookstores, this situation puts a damper on sales.
What else can a writer do to check if a publisher is legitimate?
Go to the local bookstore and see if any of the publisher’s titles are stocked. Ask the manager if necessary.
Search the Internet using the publisher’s name plus the word ‘scam’ or ‘complaint.’
A publisher’s website is targeted to its customers. If the website promotes the books they’ve published that’s a good sign.
If the website is focused on recruiting writers, that’s a bad sign.
Go to forums or bulletin boards that are for writers and see what the authors who have published with the publisher you’re considering have to say about their experience.
The Potential of Print on Demand Technology
Posted by Buy essay Blog | Uncategorized | Posted on June 18th, 2009
As a book author, have you ever experience needing to print a hundred copies of your book in just a few days? Have you ever felt the stress and anxiety of finding a printing company that will do the print for you in such a short time yet at an affordable price? Most authors have probably experienced this. In the past, where modern technologies were not yet available finding the right printing company is stressful already. Added to that stress is finding a print shop who will not charge you more than what you can afford. But thanks to the knowledge and experience of some experts and they are created technologies that can allow fast turnaround of print jobs at affordable prices.
Have you heard of Print on Demand, POD for short? Well, POD is basically a digital printing technology that lets you print a book or magazine and bound it in just a few minutes. The concept behind POD is that the ink is laid to a paper that allows words and images to be printed with amazing speed. This printing technique makes it easy and cost effective to produce books from one copy to thousands of copies. Once everything is ready, your book can be printed ‘on demand’. This means that if someone wants your book, they just have to pay for them and they will be printed a copy. Also, if you want a copy of your book you have to pay for it but you receive a royalty on all other orders.
A carefully produced POD book can have a quality almost the same from its offset counterpart. An average reader won’t be able to tell the difference and know whether the book that they are reading was produced by the offset process or POD technology. Nevertheless, there are still publishers and authors who don’t make use of the benefits of POD and continue to avail of the printing process they are familiar with. This probably because with POD the promotion of your book falls on the author’s shoulder compared to traditional publishing method. The book must be strongly marketed because bookstores would rarely stock them or even offer signings with their authors. People want to read good books, but the marketing tactic must be effective to make the readers aware that the books are available for them to read and buy. Additionally, there are some industry analysts and readers who do not settle for books that are not published in the usual sense. For this reason they do not patronize POD produced books. This problem is also shared by electronic books that don’t include physical copies at all.
But despite the drawbacks of POB publishing, it must still be noted that this publishing technique has functions and features that are not available with traditional publishing. And it must be understood that POD publishing should be judged based not on the technology it uses but on the effort they make in order to produce books that booklovers want to read.
The Potential of Print on Demand Technology
Posted by Buy essay Blog | Uncategorized | Posted on June 18th, 2009
As a book author, have you ever experience needing to print a hundred copies of your book in just a few days? Have you ever felt the stress and anxiety of finding a printing company that will do the print for you in such a short time yet at an affordable price? Most authors have probably experienced this. In the past, where modern technologies were not yet available finding the right printing company is stressful already. Added to that stress is finding a print shop who will not charge you more than what you can afford. But thanks to the knowledge and experience of some experts and they are created technologies that can allow fast turnaround of print jobs at affordable prices.
Have you heard of Print on Demand, POD for short? Well, POD is basically a digital printing technology that lets you print a book or magazine and bound it in just a few minutes. The concept behind POD is that the ink is laid to a paper that allows words and images to be printed with amazing speed. This printing technique makes it easy and cost effective to produce books from one copy to thousands of copies. Once everything is ready, your book can be printed ‘on demand’. This means that if someone wants your book, they just have to pay for them and they will be printed a copy. Also, if you want a copy of your book you have to pay for it but you receive a royalty on all other orders.
A carefully produced POD book can have a quality almost the same from its offset counterpart. An average reader won’t be able to tell the difference and know whether the book that they are reading was produced by the offset process or POD technology. Nevertheless, there are still publishers and authors who don’t make use of the benefits of POD and continue to avail of the printing process they are familiar with. This probably because with POD the promotion of your book falls on the author’s shoulder compared to traditional publishing method. The book must be strongly marketed because bookstores would rarely stock them or even offer signings with their authors. People want to read good books, but the marketing tactic must be effective to make the readers aware that the books are available for them to read and buy. Additionally, there are some industry analysts and readers who do not settle for books that are not published in the usual sense. For this reason they do not patronize POD produced books. This problem is also shared by electronic books that don’t include physical copies at all.
But despite the drawbacks of POB publishing, it must still be noted that this publishing technique has functions and features that are not available with traditional publishing. And it must be understood that POD publishing should be judged based not on the technology it uses but on the effort they make in order to produce books that booklovers want to read.
The Secret Of Writing Successful Business Letters
Posted by Buy essay Blog | Uncategorized | Posted on June 17th, 2009
The business letters help communicate with business acquaintances just like the other popular mode of communication but with a major difference. Business letters go down in a transaction, as having evidenced whatever matter of relevance, being communicated. But on a normal business day, a business letter puts on record facts and figures which can be referred later unlike what telecommunication does.
The Basics of Writing an Effective Business Letter
To get to the basics, you must understand that business letters are bound by sort of unwritten regulations of which, some are specific to the type of letter you are writing. Point number two: Business letters are always written on the organizations’ letterheads. Three: The language used must be formal regardless of the occasion and matter.
Address the person by titles like Dear Mr., Dear Ms. Director; General Manager, if you don’t know their names and it is fine to use their names when you know. The title Ms., is an important one to watch since you can’t write Miss or Mrs., unless you know for sure.
Then there is the section on reference on which you are writing; give a subject title to your letter indicative of the body of your letter.
Begin the matter by explaining your intentions to write and straight away come to the body. For example, you can begin with ‘…I am writing to enquire about…’ if this is a general or a purchase enquiry letter. For communicating discrepancies, begin something like ‘We are deeply disappointed to see your fax message regarding … treating the ….’ continuing the letter, you can suggest or state in definitive words, as the case may be, ‘We demand a complete refund of…’ or ‘Our management has decided to return the consignment for…’
The closing remarks must be in their formal best. While thanking the reader, you can end it like, yours sincerely, in case you have addressed the letter to none in particular, and then thanking by yours truly is appropriate.
Secret of Business Letter Writing
Business letters are also documental evidences apart from being tools of communications. The language, the tone and the format always remain broadly same regardless of the relation you share with the person whom you are writing to. The business letter drafter must be communicating the matter in full awareness of the subject matter and the eventual consequences of writing it. A wrong or omitted statement could severely deal a blow (Missed skill in your job application, for example.) Make use of common sense and internet guides, if needed.
The Secret Of Writing Successful Business Letters
Posted by Buy essay Blog | Uncategorized | Posted on June 17th, 2009
The business letters help communicate with business acquaintances just like the other popular mode of communication but with a major difference. Business letters go down in a transaction, as having evidenced whatever matter of relevance, being communicated. But on a normal business day, a business letter puts on record facts and figures which can be referred later unlike what telecommunication does.
The Basics of Writing an Effective Business Letter
To get to the basics, you must understand that business letters are bound by sort of unwritten regulations of which, some are specific to the type of letter you are writing. Point number two: Business letters are always written on the organizations’ letterheads. Three: The language used must be formal regardless of the occasion and matter.
Address the person by titles like Dear Mr., Dear Ms. Director; General Manager, if you don’t know their names and it is fine to use their names when you know. The title Ms., is an important one to watch since you can’t write Miss or Mrs., unless you know for sure.
Then there is the section on reference on which you are writing; give a subject title to your letter indicative of the body of your letter.
Begin the matter by explaining your intentions to write and straight away come to the body. For example, you can begin with ‘…I am writing to enquire about…’ if this is a general or a purchase enquiry letter. For communicating discrepancies, begin something like ‘We are deeply disappointed to see your fax message regarding … treating the ….’ continuing the letter, you can suggest or state in definitive words, as the case may be, ‘We demand a complete refund of…’ or ‘Our management has decided to return the consignment for…’
The closing remarks must be in their formal best. While thanking the reader, you can end it like, yours sincerely, in case you have addressed the letter to none in particular, and then thanking by yours truly is appropriate.
Secret of Business Letter Writing
Business letters are also documental evidences apart from being tools of communications. The language, the tone and the format always remain broadly same regardless of the relation you share with the person whom you are writing to. The business letter drafter must be communicating the matter in full awareness of the subject matter and the eventual consequences of writing it. A wrong or omitted statement could severely deal a blow (Missed skill in your job application, for example.) Make use of common sense and internet guides, if needed.
The Secrets Of Effective Article Posting
Posted by Buy essay Blog | Uncategorized | Posted on June 16th, 2009
Submitting articles to article directories is a proven way to attract more visitors to your website, give you a higher search engine rankings and, ultimately, make you more money. However, search engines and article directories are getting tougher on the articles you submit and how you submit them. In this article we give you some tips on how to submit articles to directories successfully.
Changes in the way search engines and article directories work in recent times mean that article marketers need to be a bit more savvy about how they go about submitting their articles. There was a time when you could write a good article, submit it to hundreds, if not thousands, of directories and watch your profits grow. These days it is not quite so simple.
The easiest way to get your article published on a lot of directories quickly is to use an article submission service. It is possible to do it by hand but this is a laborious and tedious task, unless you submit to just a small number of directories.
There are many article submission services available online, both free and paid, or you can invest in software that will do the job for you. These can be effective but there is a danger that article directories will reject your content if they suspect you are using an automated submission method. In a worst case scenario you could be banned from submitting to the directory again.
So, if you are using an article submission service check that their methods will not cause you problems with the directories. If you are submitting articles yourself, do not submit too many articles to any one directory at the same time.
Duplicate content
An even bigger problem for article marketers is that the major engines now penalize duplicate content. In the past you could submit an article to 100 article directories and the likes of Google and Yahoo! would award you for having 100 backlinks to your website. You would also be awarded when the article was picked up and used by other websites. However, this has changed.
The search engines can now recognize duplicate content. So, even if your article appears on 1,000 different websites you will still only be awarded for one backlink. You will of course gain traffic that accesses your website directly through the link provided with your article. However, this makes it much more difficult to use article submissions as a search engine optimization tool.
The only way to get around this is to submit a unique version of each article you write to each article directory. Again, if you only submit articles to a small number of directories you could tweak each article yourself so you have a number of different versions. However, if you are submitting to hundreds of directories this is out of the question.
It is not really known just how much an article needs to be changed to become unique. Some argue simply switching paragraphs within an article is enough, while others think that the text within the paragraphs needs to be changed too.
There are a number of possible solutions to this problem. Many article submission services have been quick to move to address this issue. As well as submitting your articles to multiple article directories they will also create different versions of each article for you or provide you with a tool for doing so yourself.
Alternatively, you could invest in some software that helps with the re-writing of articles. These are also known as article spinners and will automatically replace words with other words of a similar meaning. For example, the word ’small’ might be changed with the word ‘little’ and so on. However, the software needs to be configured to do so manually. Others will simply change the order of paragraphs in articles. This can also be very time consuming and may not do enough to make the different versions unique in the eyes of the search engines.
One final option could be to get outside help. There are many websites such as elance.com and getafreelancer.com where you can post rewriting projects for professional writers. The quality of the work will vary but rates can be quite cheap.
It may be a good idea to try out these methods and see how they work for you. You will have to invest some money but it will be worth it if you find a workable solution to duplicate content.
Writing articles and submitting them to article directories can be as beneficial a marketing and SEO tool as it has ever been. However, doing it successfully is a little trickier than it was before. We hope the advice in this article helps you build a successful article marketing campaign.
The Secrets Of Effective Article Posting
Posted by Buy essay Blog | Uncategorized | Posted on June 16th, 2009
Submitting articles to article directories is a proven way to attract more visitors to your website, give you a higher search engine rankings and, ultimately, make you more money. However, search engines and article directories are getting tougher on the articles you submit and how you submit them. In this article we give you some tips on how to submit articles to directories successfully.
Changes in the way search engines and article directories work in recent times mean that article marketers need to be a bit more savvy about how they go about submitting their articles. There was a time when you could write a good article, submit it to hundreds, if not thousands, of directories and watch your profits grow. These days it is not quite so simple.
The easiest way to get your article published on a lot of directories quickly is to use an article submission service. It is possible to do it by hand but this is a laborious and tedious task, unless you submit to just a small number of directories.
There are many article submission services available online, both free and paid, or you can invest in software that will do the job for you. These can be effective but there is a danger that article directories will reject your content if they suspect you are using an automated submission method. In a worst case scenario you could be banned from submitting to the directory again.
So, if you are using an article submission service check that their methods will not cause you problems with the directories. If you are submitting articles yourself, do not submit too many articles to any one directory at the same time.
Duplicate content
An even bigger problem for article marketers is that the major engines now penalize duplicate content. In the past you could submit an article to 100 article directories and the likes of Google and Yahoo! would award you for having 100 backlinks to your website. You would also be awarded when the article was picked up and used by other websites. However, this has changed.
The search engines can now recognize duplicate content. So, even if your article appears on 1,000 different websites you will still only be awarded for one backlink. You will of course gain traffic that accesses your website directly through the link provided with your article. However, this makes it much more difficult to use article submissions as a search engine optimization tool.
The only way to get around this is to submit a unique version of each article you write to each article directory. Again, if you only submit articles to a small number of directories you could tweak each article yourself so you have a number of different versions. However, if you are submitting to hundreds of directories this is out of the question.
It is not really known just how much an article needs to be changed to become unique. Some argue simply switching paragraphs within an article is enough, while others think that the text within the paragraphs needs to be changed too.
There are a number of possible solutions to this problem. Many article submission services have been quick to move to address this issue. As well as submitting your articles to multiple article directories they will also create different versions of each article for you or provide you with a tool for doing so yourself.
Alternatively, you could invest in some software that helps with the re-writing of articles. These are also known as article spinners and will automatically replace words with other words of a similar meaning. For example, the word ’small’ might be changed with the word ‘little’ and so on. However, the software needs to be configured to do so manually. Others will simply change the order of paragraphs in articles. This can also be very time consuming and may not do enough to make the different versions unique in the eyes of the search engines.
One final option could be to get outside help. There are many websites such as elance.com and getafreelancer.com where you can post rewriting projects for professional writers. The quality of the work will vary but rates can be quite cheap.
It may be a good idea to try out these methods and see how they work for you. You will have to invest some money but it will be worth it if you find a workable solution to duplicate content.
Writing articles and submitting them to article directories can be as beneficial a marketing and SEO tool as it has ever been. However, doing it successfully is a little trickier than it was before. We hope the advice in this article helps you build a successful article marketing campaign.