90 Days to Your Novel: A Day-by-Day Plan for Outlining & Writing Your Book

Celebrated writing teacher and author Martha Alderson has devised a plotting system that's as innovative as it is easy to implement. With her foolproof blueprint, you'll learn to devise a successful storyline for any genre. She shows how to:

• Use the power of the Universal Story
• Create plot lines and subplots that work together
• Effectively use a scene tracker for maximum impact
• Insert energetic markers at the right points in your story
• Show character transformation at the book's climax

This is the ultimate guide for you to write page-turners that sell!

Nine authors with more than 25 published books between them offer countless insights to help your writing leave a mark.

These candid author interviews speak to overcoming self doubt, triumphing over writer's block, mastering the editing process, learning to trust your literary instincts, and more. The raw authenticity will encourage and inspire other writers. If they can do it, so can you.

Featuring Kelly O'Connor McNees, Jim Ottaviani, Rachael Herron, Rhonda Stapleton, Sarah Quigley, Josh Berk, Helen Ellis, Eileen Cook, and Lara Zielin.

Take your fiction to the next level!

Maybe you're a first-time novelist looking for practical guidance. Maybe you've already been published, but your latest effort is stuck in mid-list limbo. Whatever the case may be, author and literary agent Donald Maass can show you how to take your prose to the next level and write a breakout novel - one that rises out of obscurity and hits the best-seller lists.

Maass details the elements that all breakout novels share - regardless of genre - then shows you writing techniques that can make your own books stand out and succeed in a crowded marketplace.

You'll learn to:

• establish a powerful and sweeping sense of time and place
• weave subplots into the main action for a complex, engrossing story
• create larger-than-life characters that step right off the page
• explore universal themes that will interest a broad audience of readers
• sustain a high degree of narrative tension from start to finish
• develop an inspired premise that sets your novel apart from the competition

In On Writing Romance, award-winning romance novelist Leigh Michaels talks you through each stage of the writing and publishing process. From the origins and evolution of the romance novel to establishing a vital story framework to writing that last line to seeking out appropriate publishers, everything you ever wanted to know about writing a romance novel is here.

In addition to a comprehensive breakdown of more than thirty romance subgenres, including such categories as historical, inspirational, Regency, and sweet traditional, you'll discover how to:

• Steer clear of clichés and stereotypes by studying the genre
• Craft engaging and realistic heroes and heroines readers will adore
• Convincingly develop the central couple's blossoming relationship
• Add conflict by utilizing essential secondary characters like the "other woman"
• Use tension and timing to make your love scenes sizzle with sensuality
• Get your characters to happily-ever-after with an ending readers will always remember

One of the biggest problem areas for writers is conveying a character's emotions to the reader in a unique, compelling way. This book comes to the rescue by highlighting 75 emotions and listing the possible body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for each. 

Using its easy-to-navigate list format, readers can draw inspiration from character cues that range in intensity to match any emotional moment. The Emotion Thesaurus also tackles common emotion-related writing problems and provides methods to overcome them. 
This writing tool encourages authors to show, not tell emotion and is a creative brainstorming resource for any fiction project.

• Help you choose the right type of outline for you
• Guide you in brainstorming plot ideas
• Aid you in discovering your characters
• Show you how to structure your scenes
• Explain how to format your finished outline
• Instruct you in how to use your outline
• Reveal the benefits
• Dispel misconceptions

• Can you describe your outlining process?
• What is the greatest benefit of outlining?
• What is the biggest potential pitfall of outlining?
• Do you recommend "pantsing" for certain situations and outlining for others?
• What's the most important contributing factor to a successful outline?

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE (UPDATED AND REVISED 2013 EDITION)

The All-Time Bestselling Book on Writing English Newly Edited (Special eBook Edition) BY WILLIAM STRUNK, JUNIOR

The Elements of Style

OVER 10 MILLION COPIES SOLD!

Revised and Updated for 2013 by
Chris Hong, Formerly of Harvard University

OVERVIEW

This book is intended for use in English courses in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature. It aims to give in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention (in Chapters II and III) on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated. The numbers of the sections may be used as references in correcting manuscript.

The book covers only a small portion of the field of English style, but the experience of its writer has been that once past the essentials, students profit most by individual instruction based on the problems of their own work, and that each instructor has his own body of theory, which he prefers to that offered by any textbook.

It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature.

NOW UPDATED AND REVISED FOR 2013

Vivid and memorable characters aren't born: they have to be made

This book is a set of tools: literary crowbars, chisels, mallets, pliers and tongs. Use them to pry, chip, yank and sift good characters out of the place where they live in your imagination.

Award-winning author Orson Scott Card explains in depth the techniques of inventing, developing and presenting characters, plus handling viewpoint in novels and short stories. With specific examples, he spells out your narrative options-the choices you'll make in creating fictional people so "real" that readers will feel they know them like members of their own families.

You'll learn how to:

• Draw characters from a variety of sources
• Make characters show who they are by the things they do and say, and by their individual "style"
• Develop characters readers will love-or love to hate
• Distinguish among major characters, minor characters and walk-ons, and develop each appropriately
• Choose the most effective viewpoint to reveal the characters and move the storytelling
• Decide how deeply you should explore your characters' thoughts, emotions, and attitudes

In a time when Shadowhunters are barely winning the fight against the forces of darkness, one battle will change the course of history forever. Welcome to the Infernal Devices trilogy, a stunning and dangerous prequel to the New York Times bestselling Mortal Instruments series.

The year is 1878. Tessa Gray descends into London’s dark supernatural underworld in search of her missing brother. She soon discovers that her only allies are the demon-slaying Shadowhunters—including Will and Jem, the mysterious boys she is attracted to. Soon they find themselves up against the Pandemonium Club, a secret organization of vampires, demons, warlocks, and humans. Equipped with a magical army of unstoppable clockwork creatures, the Club is out to rule the British Empire, and only Tessa and her allies can stop them....

Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor. This haunting novel about the dilemma of passivity vs. passion has become a modern classic.

     The Perks of Being a Wallflower is the story of what it’s like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie’s letters are singular and unique, hilarious and devastating. We may not know where he lives or to whom he is writing. All we know is the world he shares. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it puts him on a strange course through uncharted territory. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and music—when all one requires to feel infinite is that perfect song on that perfect drive.

     Through Charlie, Stephen Chbosky has created a deeply affecting story, a powerful novel that will spirit you back to those wild and poignant roller coaster days known as growing up.