Andrew Jack Writing

Andrew Jack's Writing Blog

A Quick Thought On Writing Temptation

Temptation is a fantastic plot device, and it’s an easy way to unstick a plot that isn’t going anywhere. The only real problem is that it’s very easy to get wrong, and the trap everyone seems to fall into is the temptation just isn’t very tempting. I’ve done, writing a scene where the main villain [...]

Writing Fighting: 12 Things Writers Need to Know

Writing about fighting is a popular pastime*. In fiction straight out combat is the resolution for a lot of problems, and it crops up in most genre fiction in one way or another. Unfortunately because most writers aren’t the type to pick fights a lot of strange things end up being written about fights that [...]

Five Things You Have To Think About Before You Self Publish

      So, hanging out on Twitter I spotted a post from the awesome Krista D Ball expressing some frustration at authors who are moaning about their lack of sales after three months in the self-publishing game. It seems like a lot of authors are getting in on the self publishing thing because they’ve [...]

10 New Year Resolutions For Writers (that might actually stick)

So, it’s January, and the haze of food and drink is starting to clear. You might vaguely remember making some promises to yourself over the New Year, but we all know how the promises we make on January the 1st usually turn out.   Maybe it’s time we made some resolutions that we can stick [...]

Ten Marketing Strategies All Writers Need To Consider

The key word here is “consider”. You don’t have to do any of these, although I certainly recommend you give some of them a try. I’ve geared these towards people who are self publishing, but there is no reason that a legacy published author couldn’t use most of these as long as their editor and [...]

Networking and Writers

This is another one of those things that I’ve spoken about before but it seems to need to be said again. You don’t need to read huge marketing guides nor sell your soul in order to make networking work for you. In fact there’s just one easy step to networking better than 90% of the [...]

Ten Things You Need To Know About Writing Conflict

Conflict is one of those nebulous terms that’s applied to writing but isn’t often well explained. Since it’s such a huge part of any story I wanted to put together list of things I wish I’d known about writing conflict when I’d started writing. First off: 1.  You have to have it.  Writing is mostly [...]

What I Learned About Writing From A Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Master

  Sometimes the best advice comes from unexpected places.     I was attending a Brazilian Jiu jitsu seminar on Friday* with BJJ maestro John Will. The seminar was mostly about breaking people’s shoulders with your legs using a move called an omopolata, but it was actually an unexpected bit of writing advice that stuck [...]

Let’s Stop Punching One Another In The Face*

Comic by Randal Munroe of XKCD.com   Every month or so it seems like the self publishing vs traditional publishing debate flares up in some new and interesting way. Then four million writers jump on the band wagon and start calling each other dicks for having one opinion or another. I’m guilty too, of sticking [...]

Five Ways To Get Back Into Writing After A Break

Things have been rough here. I discovered that I could no longer go to World Fantasy Con in San Diego this year (Toronto next year, I hope!), the ground continues to shake my city and in general things have been super, super busy.     There’s also been a very sick cat. We found Connie [...]

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