Tag: Writers Resources

Ghost Writer

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I ‘met’ Karen Cole on Twitter. She is chief executive of Ghost Writer Inc. When she offered to do a guest post for Write Enough, I was delighted to accept. I had only a hazy idea of what ghost writers do until I read her post. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.

Hiring a Ghost Writer – for Clients

By Karen Cole

Many people nowadays have websites, and they need to have professional content written for them. In order to do that, they will need to hire ghost writers. The fact is that ghost writers are people who are specialized in writing any piece of work, as long as it involves information that is easily accessible on the internet. Upon completion of their projects, the ghost writers will be paid for the pieces they have written, yet they will not be given any credit by the buyer.

How to hire ghost writers:

1. First of all, clients need to define the scope of their ghost writing projects. Buyers who hire ghost writers must be specific about the topics they want the ghost writers to research and write about, the number of words the projects will contain, the styles of the pieces, and if the buyers have special instructions, they should tell the ghost writers about them. Depending on the number of words the buyers request, the ghost writers will charge them accordingly.

2. It could be that the buyers will hire ghost writers who have experience within their niches. This will further increase the prices of their projects, so they need to be aware of this. Such ghost writers are perfect for those looking to have ebooks written, as well as printed books and screenplays. If the topics are highly technical, hiring ghost writers who are proficient at ghost writing in such styles is recommended.

3. Coming up with a realistic budget for each project must be considered. The budgets should allow buyers to get the best
ghost writers. More experienced ghost writers will charge more than newbies. Success will depend on the expertise of the ghost writers, and that is why hiring experienced ones should be a priority.

4. Before hiring any ghost writers, it’s recommended that people check out their portfolios and also references, if they can find them on the Internet. This way, buyers can assess the skills of those ghost writers and decide whether or not to go with their ghost writing services.

5. Last but not least, if the buyers agree to hire one or more ghost writers, contracts must be drawn up. Each one must specify who gets the rights and recognition for the work, the method of payment, and the total cost of each project.

Finding ghost writers is not hard, but it requires buyers to do some research before going with a ghost writing service. Choosing ghost writers who don’t have experience in needed subject matters and hoping for them to deliver quality ghost writing work at low prices is unrealistic and should not be attempted. The quality of ghost writers is always more important than a few extra dollars.

You can find Karen on twitter at @karencole37

And here’s the link if you want to investigate Karen’s services further. http://www.rainbowriting.com/ghostwriterportfolio.htm

A River of Stones January 2012 – a mindful writing challenge

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Last January I took part in ‘a River of Stones’ (aros) and I posted my ‘stones’ here on the blog and on Twitter. And this January, I’ll be taking part again. It’s actually my intention to do an ‘independent’ advent series from Dec 1st – not as part of the official river – but borrowing the concept.

You can find out all about the aros project at http://www.writingourwayhome.com/p/river-jan-12.html  Here’s what  Fiona Robyn, a founding partner, at the ‘writing our way home’ website said on Facebook when launching this year’s river.

‘Pay more attention and fall in love with the world. Join our mindful writing challenge, ‘a river of stones’, in January ’12. Here’s how: 1. Notice something properly every day during January. 2. Write it down. Easy peasy! Will you join us? … You’ll create a ‘small stone’ every day when you pay proper attention to something (a cloudy sky, or your cat leaping lightly across the lawn) and then write it down as accurately as you can. Writing small stones will help you to engage with the world around you – to enjoy every sip of your black coffee, to savour the scent of lemon wafting around your kitchen, to appreciate the grungy sliminess of your compost pile. You can post your small stones on a blog or Twitter, or keep them in a notebook. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is to keep your eyes, nose, ears, mouth, mind and fingers open. Who knows what you’ll find… Get your funky blog badge and find out all about the challenge here: http://www.writingourwayhome.com/p/river-jan-12.html Do invite your friends – the more the merrier. Last year we had 350 people take part from around the world. This year we’d love the river to be MUCH wider….’
You don’t have to be writer to take part and you don’t even have to publish your stones anywhere –  apart from in your own notebook. I look forward to seeing some of you down by the riverside…

Want to write a novel – Just Do It (3). Hatch that plot.

writeanne4 Comments
mindmap [RE]Design
Image by Denkbeeldhouwer via Flickr

So here’s part 3 in my series of posts for beginner writers…

Plotting

Right, where were we? We’d got started on the novel –
overcome the self-doubt and procrastination. We’d fallen in love with our
characters and breathed life into them.

So what now? What are you going to have these characters do?
What is going to happen to them? How will you introduce them to your readers? What
will their journey be?

First of all – the thing about plotting is that there is no
one correct way to do it. It’s like cooking – everyone has their own take on
methods – even where the ingredients and the outcome are similar. My mother and
my mother-in-law were both superb bakers – meringues to die for – but they used
two quite different procedures to create them. One baked them in an oven – the
French way – and the other plopped the beaten egg whites into boiling water –
the Italian way. And that’s how it is with plotting – you do what works for
you. Below are just three of the ways – you might only ever use one of them, or
you may change method depending on the novel, or you may mix and match – or you
may do none of them in any conscious way and simply write, improvising as you
go. But if cooking without a recipe scares you, you may find what follows
useful.

First up – you might like a linear layout when planning – one
scene heading, followed by the next, and the next and so on. This will work
well if you already have a clear idea of how your story is to develop. You
might follow the heading with notes on the action within the scene. It will all
run down the page – in portrait layout – beginning, middle and end all sorted.

Or you may do the above – but with only a definite start and
end point already planned – and fill in the scenes in between as you think it
all through.

However, it may be that you don’t have scenes as such. It
could be that you have fragments – an assortment of images – of experiences and
occurrences for your characters. Perhaps then you can storyboard. That is write
and/or draw out these images on cards. Then lay them out, swap them round, see
where the gaps are, do cards to fill the gaps. As you ponder the gaps you will
probably find you begin to ask yourself, and answer, all the why questions
about your plot, about what is driving it. You must be able to answer the
question as to why a particular scene is there.
If you can’t, then discard it. It’s superfluous. You’ll also start to
resolve the ‘how’ questions as you move from card to card. Perhaps new
characters and ideas will emerge as you work. Perhaps a timeline or natural
order may start to emerge.  You may well
see a sort of clustering, or coming together,  of scenes at certain points – these will
provide your ‘jumpcuts’ and chapter breaks – and you may well discard some
in-between scenes altogether.

And then there’s a third way. That is the mind-map, spider
diagram or cluster plotting method. Here think landscape rather than portrait.
Take a sheet of A4, or even, A3 paper and write your novel’s working title in
the middle and draw a box or cloud shape around what you’ve written. Now do
several short lines coming off this central box or blob. At the end of these
lines write, or indeed, draw the key scenes, images or events you already have
in your head. Draw a box around each of these. Then see if you can extend any
of these scene/event boxes with blobs of their own. You can continue branching
off as much as you like. It should become obvious which are the meatier scenes,
which ones are sparking off possible subplots. The more substantial plot blobs
or boxes will be the ones you’ll probably allocate most words to. You may well
also see how the scenes should link up and perhaps begin to see an order of
events. And as with the other methods you will probably find scenes that are so
insubstantial they can be dropped altogether.

Whatever plotting method you use you will need to peg your
scenes to a story arc. Your plot must serve as a roadmap for the characters’
actions. It must bring your characters together at just the right moment. You
need to decide on your opening scene, on where your telling will begin. The
plot will almost certainly begin long before your story does. You will weave in
any relevant pre-details as you tell the story. Your start point should be
where the characters’ backstories become nowstories. So looking at your plan –
linear, storyboard or mind-map, you will need to move those scenes around –
number them, arrow them, or change their order in the pile.

It doesn’t matter if you open your story at the end and tell
it as flashback or if you begin at the middle and flashback and move forward –
or if you simply drive forward. However there is a classic set of ingredients
that the story arc should probably contain and that is:

1.Stasis – once upon a time

2.Trigger – the unpredictable event

3.Quest – the protagonist(s) begins to seek

4.Surprise – discovers the unexpected

5.Critical choice – difficult decision

6.Climax – the consequence of 5

7.Reversal – change of status

8.Resolution – acceptance of new state.

But the most important thing of all about the plotting stage
is to just go for it. Don’t pause or censor or edit – that will come when you
have all your scenes before you. Enjoy this very creative phase of pre-writing
– rule nothing in or out.

Have Fun!

N.B. There is an excellent post and youtube video on cluster
plotting at http://johannaharness.com/2010/10/21/clusterplotting.
If you’re a writer who uses twitter, you will almost certainly have heard of
Johanna. She is the person behind the #amwriting hashtag and won last year’s
inaugural Chris Al-Aswad prize awarded by Eight Cuts.