This is an excellent question that came up recently, and the answer isn’t as obvious as you might think. Also, the answer really matters, if you’re an author hoping to be published somewhere, or striving to self-publish wisely. There is no single answer, either: it will depend on the context, on the kind of publication […]
Best Practices for a Plagiaristic Publishing World
Cristiane Serruya has turned out to be an archetypal 21st-Century plagiarist. She exemplifies genre-fiction plagiarism at its “best”: minimum cost and effort, maximum profit and social success. She had high standards for whose work she plagiarized—only rip off the best—and she “serruyaed” together scenes and passages from more than seventy different sources for each of […]
Plagiarism’s #MeToo Moment Has Arrived
With Nora Roberts’ revelation of Cristiane Serruya’s rampant plagiarism igniting a Twitter firestorm in the romance-genre publishing community, the #MeToo moment for plagiarized authors may have arrived. This time the Bad Guy of the story isn’t men taking sexual advantage of vulnerable women, it’s self-published plagiarist authors taking advantage of vulnerable established authors. How can […]
Building Solid Paragraphs
I see it all the time. A perfectly good scene, shoehorned into just three or four monolithic paragraphs. Or a whole dialogue poured into a single huge paragraph, flat and solid as a concrete sidewalk. Sometimes a writer will err in the opposite direction, smashing a coherent paragraph into smaller shards just to add more […]
Ingredients of an Introduction
When writing the introduction section of a thesis or dissertation, students often offer too much or too little information, or the wrong sort of information altogether. Don’t make your introduction more complicated than it ought to be. An introduction really does “introduce” your dissertation to a reader who might be interested in it. To do […]
Click-Whirrr: Writing Without Fail
Writers’ block can be overcome by putting into practice a “click-whirrr routine” which, like Pavlov’s bell, tells your mind it’s time to write, and pulls out all the mental stops and blocks to let you do so. First, eliminate any immediate interruptions, both internal (check your messages, empty your brain of nagging things to remember by […]