Writers and Authors

Showing posts with label research and writing tips. Show all posts

Sharing your experiences with your readers, guest post by Catherine Olen

As an established author I had written several books on non-fiction topics, The Upside of Undertaking as a memoir and The Final Curtain, Celebrity Deaths as a biography of the great people of Hollywood. Both of these books were written with an outline of the chapters and traditional writing methods. The Great Disneyland Scavenger Hunt I realized from the beginning this would be a completely different experience.

As a writer I have found we are in constant need to updating out writing skills as well as being flexible about the structure of our writing. It would have been nearly impossible for a traditional outline to be used when creating a book of questions and answers with facts pepper throughout the chapters. It was part of my learning process to determine the easiest way to communicate the information about Disneyland resort without falling back on using format of my previous books.

http://amzn.to/29LQ6P1

Part of the process of any writer is to research other works in the same genre to see what other authors have used in their books, then determine which have been effective and which fell short of their target.

Your writing style should always reflect your personality but, as writers, it is more important to consider the needs of your readers. If you are writing a book of lists, it would become quite boring for the reader to see page after page of bullet points. How can you convey the information while engaging the readers interest through the last chapter?

With The Great Disneyland Scavenger Hunt I have engaged the reader by having a questions and answer format, rather than just a question. This allows the reader to engage in finding the material but giving them clues with having a set number of answers to choose from. While this has proven to be very effective, I was still concerned with the possibility of a reader becoming stuck on a question. It was my decision to create a QR code and the end of each chapter leading the reader to my website where clues can be found to assist them with their quest.

As we know as readers, it is very easy in this fast paced era we live in to lose the attention of the reader quickly. This requires us to think even more about how to keep the attention of the reader. It is even better if you can achieve this in a way and market your other offers at the same time, even better. This creates a win win situation for you and your reader.

With The Great Disneyland Scavenger Hunt, the QR code gives the reader the added assistance they need when stuck, keeping them engaged and present and at the same time sending them to my website where they will see additional books, iPhone apps and other products they may be interested in now or in the future. The reader not only receives the assistance they need but they also get the opportunity to see additional products that will enhance their reading experience. Never be afraid to show your readers how you can continue to entertain and inform.

As a writer it is your responsibility to share your experiences with the readers, this includes innovative ways to keep them interested in you as a writer. Traditional marketing methods are still valid but limiting in speaking to a broad audience. The social media wave has given authors great new methods of getting their word out to the reader. Having a Facebook page or Twitter account is not even enough to get in touch with the greatest number of potential readers. Do you have a Youtube channel? Perhaps a Vine account? Not only will your creativity be stretched in new directions but it will give you inspiration for new literary projects in the future.

Catherine Olen has enjoyed a love affair with the magic of the Disney theme parks for as long as she can remember, counting herself among Disneyland passholders for the last twenty-five years. Previously, Olen owned and operated Hollywood Grave Hunter and is the proud author of The Final Curtain: Celebrity Deaths and The Upside of Undertaking, chronicling her previous career experiences. She has been a correspondent to Entertainment Tonight (US and France), The Biography Channel, Reelz Network, and the Mark & Brian radio show.

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A Fine Sense of Place, guest post by Marilyn Larew, www.writersandauthors.info

As writers, we all know the importance of grounding our work firmly in the place where it occurs. Not by a long, involved nineteenth-century description of every leaf on every tree in sight. Just enough description to give the reader a feel for the place. For New York or London or Paris that’s not really a problem. A few words and an address will do, but Lee Carruthers’ adventures take place in Morocco and Dubai, neither of which is well-known to US readers. What to do?

The Internet might have been invented for writers. You can find pictures of everything under the sun. I have fat folders of saved pictures and short historical bits about Morocco. I have fewer about Dubai, but Dubai smaller than Morocco. Online maps aren’t so good; you can’t have everything, but you can have my favorite Internet resource, Google Earth.

Google Earth is an amazingly flexible program that allows you to visualize any place on earth in as much detail as you want. Roads, rivers, towns, buildings, the countryside—they’re all on display. If you want 3-D, you can have that too. With just the click of a button you can walk down the streets of major cities. Just for fun once, I found the street where the last Paris hotel we stayed in was. Then in 3-D, I popped the buildings up and found the hotel. I located the window to the room where we stayed. I went around the corner to the Moroccan restaurant where we dined. Up that street to a café where we often stopped for a snack. Besides being fun, it was a check on the accuracy of the program.

The Spider Catchers is set in Fez, Morocco, and in the Algerian desert. Global Earth made the map of Fez come alive—streets, buildings, markets. It was easy to imagine I was there. Its take on the Algerian desert was even more important, since Lee Carruthers and a colleague escaped from a terrorist camp and went on the run. I could plot their path from the camp along the highway, through a sandy path between rocky hills, and up the hill where they ran out of gas and were recaptured. I could see it, describe it. I could even measure it.

For Dead in Dubai, I found the program equally useful. The United Arab Emirates is a 600 kilometer long collection of small Arab states with its front on the Persian Gulf across from Iran and its back to the Rub' al Khali, the “empty quarter” in the Saudi Arabian desert. In some places it’s as much as thirty-five kilometers wide, each green inch painfully built using desalinated seawater.

Long and narrow, Dubai is a fabulous and complicated place, originally built around a freshwater creek that allowed the old pearl fishing village to survive. Today the creek divides the emirate into two unequal parts with hotels, shopping centers, docks, and an old quarter of neighborhoods and souks just like the old days. Dubai also has divided highways, golf courses, tall towers like the ones on my book cover that have office and apartment space, and a huge new port, Jebel Ali, capable of docking an American aircraft carrier with room to spare. That’s a lot to describe. Global Earth allowed me to zero in on the place and view the whole scene in 3-D.

You can download pictures, yes, but pictures won’t give you an idea of the whole place. Google Earth will. It will allow you to see the entirety or drill down and magnify any part of it to see the detail.

Okay. I’m a map junkie. I admit it. I’ve got a map of every place I’ve ever been. Sure, I love maps, but Google Earth has helped me see and write about two places I’ve never been in such detail that reviewers are convinced I’ve been there. I think it will help you ground your stories as well.

MARILYNN LAREW is a historian who has published in such disparate fields as American colonial and architectural history, Vietnamese military history, and terrorism, and has taught courses in each of them in the University of Maryland System. Before settling on the Mason-Dixon line in southern Pennsylvania, she lived in Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Georgia, Wisconsin, Ohio, South Carolina, Maryland, in Manila, and on Okinawa. It’s no surprise that she likes to travel. When she’s climbing the first hill in Istanbul to Topkapi Palace, strolling around Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi, or exploring the back streets of Kowloon, she is not just having fun, she’s looking for locations for her next novel. When she’s not traveling, she is writing or reading. She writes thrillers and likes to read them. She also likes to read Vietnamese history and Asian history in general, as well as military history. She lives with her husband in a 200-year-old farmhouse in southern Pennsylvania. She belongs to Sisters in Crime, the Guppies, and the Chinese Military History Society.

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