What motivates someone to write? What kind of people are writers? Is writing a job, or a passion? ... or both?

Writing isn't only about putting words onto the page. It is about the expression of ideas, the sharing of feelings, and a journey into the soul of who you are.

Informative and inspiring, Soul of the Writer is a book for every writer. Whether published, or just beginning to find your muse, this book can aid you in your journey.

Although filled with advice and helpful ideas from many writers, this book is not a manual, or a 'how to' book on writing. Nor is it a book on how to become a writer. If you're a writer, you know it already.

Instead, Soul of the Writer is an exploration into what it means to be a writer. At least from this writer's point of view ...

Writing good fiction is more than having a great story in your head. It is creating characters that live and breathe and plots that grip the reader. It is creating a setting that is real to your readers, dialogue that sparkles, and pacing that drives the story forward. It is action scenes that put the reader, sweaty palmed, in the middle of it all, and love scenes that melt the reader’s heart. You need to learn the art of crafting a story.

How do you get your story published? Foundations of Fiction takes you step by step through the process of finding an agent or publisher, and creating a compelling synopsis.

All writers serve an apprenticeship as they learn their craft, but learning by trial and error is frustrating and tedious. Foundations of Fiction covers all of the nitty-gritty techniques of fiction writing. This how-to book, written by an author who has been there and done that, is your foremost source for creating a story that sells!

Also included is how to write about relationship issues in mystery and suspense fiction. How do mystery writers use personality research to develop and drive their characters and plots in novels and stories?

Write eulogies and anecdotes or vignettes of life stories and personal histories for mini-biographies and autobiographies. Then condense or contract the life stories or personal histories into PowerPoint presentations and similar slide shows on disks using lots of photos and one-page of life story.

Finally, collect lots of vignettes and flesh-out the vignettes, linking them together into first-person diary-style novels and books, plays, skits, or other larger works. Write memoirs or eulogies for people or ghostwrite biographies and autobiographies for others.

The vignette can be read in ten minutes. So fill magazine space with a direct experience vignette. Magazine space needs only 1,500 words. When you link many vignettes together, each forms a book chapter or can be adapted to a play or script.

Included are a full-length diary-format first person novel and a three-act play, including a monologue for performances. There's a demand for direct life experiences written or produced as vignettes and presented in small packages.

Save those vignettes electronically. Later, they can be placed together as chapters in a book or adapted as a play or script, turned into magazine feature, specialty, or news columns, or offered separately as easy-to-read packages.

An easy-to-follow guide to successful writing, from first notes to final draft. Letters, memos, proposals, resumes, news releases, term papers, articles, stories, poems, and more. Upbeat, motivating, practical. An entire writer's workshop in one handy volume featuring specific exercises and models for all types of writing. Includes start-up sheets, checklists, review sheets, "before" and "after" versions, outdoor writing experiments, common errors in grammar and punctuation, tips for becoming your own best editor, and ten things to try when you are stuck.

Clear steps and examples bring rapid writing improvement. Based on the author's thirty years' experience teaching in colleges and corporations, 50 Ways to Help You Write generates vivid, effective writing.

Sample Exercises: Business writers can "follow the MBA formula" (main point, benefits, action) to organize writing. Creative writers can sit by a window or a river, follow the steps to heighten awareness, and "let nature express your theme." Article writers learn to "freely write your gripe" with compassionate objectivity. Students writing papers economize their time by first filling in a quick "Plan Your Pages" sheet. Teachers will find dozens of new, proven classroom "experiments" yielding a rich experience from which words freely flow.

Here's the challenge.

Slap an eye on any page of Easy Reading Writing, or browse the book. If you have trouble reading anything, hey, place it back on the shelf. It means I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Easy Reading Writing is full of examples, humorous and irrelevant, yet explain the fine points of building believable plots, characters that breathe, and effective sentences, paragraphs, chapters that pass through the reader's eye as smoothly as a film strip passes through a movie projector.

Our job is not to tell a story, but to use the words that will trigger the memory and life experiences of our readers, so they will build our world inside their heads.

Our writing must never be just good enough. Either it's the best we can make it or it's not. There is no backdoor to effective writing.

Better to read light Easy Reading Writing than to curse the darkness of rejections.

DON'T STOP WITH THE PERIOD

The richness of English comes from its enormous vocabulary—upward of a million words. But how many punctuation marks are available to help communicate all the subtlety and nuances of the language? A piddling handful of tired, overworked dots, dashes, and devices that fall short when it comes to delivering the written word as the writer intended it. Metapunctuation, the product of the brilliant if somewhat askew mind of Lewis Burke Frumkes, adds the absent flair and precision, ends ambiguity, and makes manifest all of English's unspoken jabs, frowns, inflections, passions, and innuendos with marks such as:

• phobic brackets to enclose fear gone wildly out of control
• infatuation marks to indicate a frivolous kind of love
• ring of indignation to really let 'em have it
• pasion waves for prose ranging from purple to blue
• contempto-drips for utter disdain

Profiling everything from classes to cyber cafes, The New York Writer's Guide sources organizations, workshops, bookshops, open-mikes, reading series, newsgroups and support groups. For the inside scoop on everything from power book-plugging protocol to the best venues for café au lait society, this is the book for you-an everything-you-need-to-know guide to the most writer-friendly city in the world.