Earnest means “serious in intention, purpose, or effort”. It means serious in the pursuit of one’s goals. One of the qualities all successful writers have in common is the earnest desire to write. It is a quality that every writer, who wants to become successful, should acquire.

Like any other creative profession, writing too is 90 percent perspiration and 10 percent inspiration. Every successful writer will tell you the importance of making writing a part of your daily life—a routine activity or habit like sleeping, eating, or bathing.

The amount of time, the exact time of the day (or night), the place, the writing material—all can vary depending on the individual.

Some people choose early mornings to write. Some others write late in the night, after everyone has gone to sleep. Yet another group of writers write both in the morning and evening. Some of them use mornings to write and evenings to revise and edit. Some write for 4-5 hours at a stretch. Some others write for 2 hours in the morning and 3 hours at night. It is a matter of individual preference.

Some people use pen and paper; some use computer; yet another group writes their first drafts or outlines on paper and then key-in the work once they have got their ideas in place. Some writers use a Dictaphone to capture the ideas and later transcribe them on to the computer or notebook. Again it is a matter of preference.

One important thing every writer needs is a writing space—a quite place where he can practice his craft without interruptions and disturbances. It can be a well equipped study, it can be a table in corner of your room, or it can be the dining table when it is not used. You can use any place as your writing space as long as it is comfortable, you can write without interruptions and disturbances, and it is available every day at your preferred time. Some writers have the gift or ability to write whenever they want and wherever they want. But for most writers, writing space is a must for producing quality output.

Irrespective of the location, duration and mechanism of writing, one factor that separates successful writers form others is that they show up to write; day after day, week after week, month after month, and no doubt year after year.

Some days you won’t be able to write anything. You just keep staring at the blank page or the empty screen. Don’t get upset or become frustrated. It happens to all writers. There are good days and bad days. But the important thing is to show up for work—to write, to read, to research, to edit, to revise, to rewrite and to write again.

You can do many things to hone your craft on your bad days. You can read, learn new words and new usages of words you know, read books on the craft of writing, solve crossword puzzles, play word games, and so on. So even if you are unable to write on a particular day, it won’t be a waste of time. You are improving your craft, learning new skills, practicing the ones you already know; all with the aim of improving your writing.

If you are stuck or you don’t have a topic to write about, you can use the prompts available in many books on writing and idea generation. But for a person who keeps his eyes, ears and mind open, I don’t think there will be any shortage of ideas.

It is not very important whether you write or do some activity related to writing. If you write, what you write is not very important. The important thing is to sit in front of your computer or notebook at your allotted writing time every day without fail. Some days you will be able to write and some days you won’t. Some days you will write pretty ordinary stuff; some other days you will write exceptionally well and on a few occasions you will create magic. But for creating the magic, you have to show up and be prepared to capture it.

As they drove away, Gallagher asked, voice slightly muffled, “How did you manage to do such a difficult task so naturally and this fast?”
“Practice, Sean, that is what it takes. Lots of practice,” Martineau told him and turned into the road that led towards Red house.
- Jack Higgins in Night of the Fox.

Once you start and continue practicing your craft day in and day out without fail, your writing will improve and there will be more days when you could write brilliantly and create magic. Once writing becomes part of your daily routine you will find a lot of things to write about as your subconscious mind is always working in the background generating ideas and crafting stories for you. So, as you progress, your writing will become effortless, the ideas will flow smoothly, the words will come marching out and arrange themselves into beautiful sentences and most of the days you will be able to write something worthwhile.

Once you become a ‘daily writer‘ your output—the amount of quality material that you can produce—will improve and soon you will have something substantial to share with others—an article, an essay, a story, a poem or even a book! Happy writing…

Are you a writer or are you one who thinks you are a writer. According to Random House Dictionary a writer is a person engaged in writing books, articles, stories, etc., esp. as an occupation or profession.

A person does not need a published book or article to be a writer. And one does not become a writer just because he or she has published a book or story. The definition of a writer is someone who is passionate about writing, who lives to write and who cannot live without writing. So are you a writer?

Given below are a few tips given by N. M. Kelby in the wonderful book The Constant Art of Being a Writer. These tips helps you in identifying whether you are a writer or some sort of hack working on a pipe-dream. I really think that we all can learn a lot from these tips:

Real writers know that there is a market for all good writing, and so they hone their craft. Hack writers know they’ll be rich and famous if only they make the right connections.

Real writers revise and revise again. Hack writers say that the famed Jack Kerouac never revised and so they don’t have to.

Real writers understand that editors who reject them have made that decision based on their own taste and the marketplace. They know that somebody else will fall in love with their work; they just have to keep trying. Hacks know the editor has no taste and is stupid—and isn’t afraid to tell her that to her face either. Or send her an e-mail to that effect, or twelve e-mails. More is better.

Real writers work, even if they don’t feel like it. This is a job after all. Hacks work when they feel inspired. Writing, after all, is a calling.

Real writers know they can always learn from their mistakes and grow. Hacks know that they are right and refuse change despite what everyone tells them.

Real writers write because they love to write. Hacks write because it is an easy way to get rich.

Real writers know that sometimes you write a weak book. Hacks know there’s a cabal of publishers plotting against them.

Real writers know brilliance when they see it. Hacks know they are brilliant.

Real writers understand publishing is a cooperative and flawed industry. Hacks feel their talent makes them the exception to every rule.

Real writers know it’s easy to get discouraged and sometimes do.

Real writers are leery of praise and know that a publishing contract is the only true sign that the work is good.

Real writers define success by being able to write and know that sometimes that big paycheck never comes.

Real writers follow their hearts.

Hacks bellow, curse, blame, gossip, and snipe. They do anything they can do to hide their broken hearts—except work.

Source: The Constant Art of Being a Writer by N. M. Kelby.

“The most difficult part of being a writer is living the life. There are no guarantees that you will be a success, and, if you are, there are no guarantees that you will continue to succeed. But you keep on working. You have no choice: it’s as if being a writer is encoded in your DNA.”

So starts the wonderful book —The Constant Art of Being a Writer: The Life, Art & Business of Fiction by N. M. Kelby, the award-winning novelist and short story writer. Even though this book deals mainly with writing fiction, writers of other genres will also benefit tremendously from this book.

The book is divided into three parts—The Life, The Work, and The Business. The first part—The Life—explores how to live the life of a writer. It explores the issues like how the writer’s life and the lives of people close to him change and how to adapt to such a life. It explains why writers write, even at the risk of losing everything they hold dear. This part also gives practical advice on how to set up your writing practice, emphasizes the need for a writing space and how to design one for you, the importance of writing regularly and creating a routine, etc. It also deals with topics like how to read as a writer, what to read, how to capture your thoughts and ideas, how to review books you have read and learn from them, how to create your support system, whether to join a writing community or create one, etc. You will also find topics like the importance of understanding your reader and how to do it, techniques to overcome the writer’s block, how to develop yourself, tips on how to apply for grants, fellowships, residencies, etc., whether to quit or keep your day job, how to manage your finances, why you should never give up, etc.

The second part—The Work—deals with the craft of writing. It starts with advice on how to generate ideas for your story and moves on to details like creating and developing characters, choosing the style, voice, tense, and point of view for your story, and how to structure and build the plot—beginning, middle, and end. This part also explores the different writing styles like magic realism, metafictive structure, and humor, how to create the outline of your story, how to research for your work, how to revise and fix problems, etc. One of the best chapters in this part is on creating bestsellers—tips on writing, presenting, targeting, marketing, and promoting your book so that it becomes a bestseller. This part also deals with tips on improving your visibility by sending the work for contests, sending them to publications for reviews, etc.

The final part—The Business—deals with the issues like agents, whether you need them, finding one that is right for you, dealing with them, etc. It also addresses the topics like contracts, your rights, what to look for in the contracts, how to sell your rights, and tips on negotiating great deals, This part deals with how to handle poor sales, how to improve the sales, how to deal with publicity, how to avoid burnouts, how to promote your book by creating your website, using images and videos, creating book trailers, blogging, networking, etc. There is an excellent chapter on book tours, book fairs and festivals, bookstore appearances, and tips on how to make the best use of these promotional activities without wasting too much of your time. It also deals with whether or not to employ a publicist and how to deal with her. This part also examines the pros and cons of self-publishing and gives useful tips and advice.

Then there are two appendices: one is a glossary of publishing jargon and the other is a list of books that will inspire and motivate you and keep you going (the surprising omission being On Writing Well by William Zinsser).

One of the best advices of the book is in the Introduction—Never waste a word on the page.

This is a MUST READ for every writer.

Book Details:

• Author: N.M. Kelby
• Publisher: Writer’s Digest Books
• Edition & Year: First, 2009
• ISBN: 9781582975757
• Cover & Page Count: Paperback, 262 Pages

Jack Heffron, the author of this book, is a freelance writer, editor, actor, and teacher. In this book he has created a resource that will help writers to jump start their writing by developing ideas from the more than 400 prompts.

According to the author writing is an act of hope, courage, joy and celebration. Writing must be approached with a sense of play, of risk and experiment, openness and laughter. You should have fun when writing.

The book is divided into four sections, each geared toward a different stage of writing, offer dozens of unique approaches to unleash your creativity. All the chapters contains prompts that will help you generate ideas for your stories, essays, novels, journal entries, etc.

Part I (Bending and Stretching) contains four chapters—Making Your Way to Schenectady, Enemies of Creativity, Leading a Creative Life and Getting Ready to Write. This part is mainly concerned with the good habits that writers should develop like showing up (keeping a specific time to write), accepting the difficulty of creative writing process and learning to tackle it, making writing a habit or part of the daily routine, turning obstacles into opportunities, etc. It also describes the enemies of creativity—procrastination, talking, critiquing, judging, not enjoying the writing and not writing. According to the author, “Write regularly and you will find ideas flowing through you.” This section also talks about the topics like where to write (creating your own writing space), when you should write and how you should do it. All these things varies depending on the individual needs of each writer. This section helps the one that will work best for you. It also emphasizes the importance of taking chances and risks. The final chapter of this section deals with creativity techniques that will help you gain momentum. The techniques include free writing, brainstorming, automatic writing, listing, clustering, cave writing, cut and paste, mix and match, etc.

Part II (Exploring) contains 13 chapters—I Yam What Yam and Other Lies, Schnitzel with Noodles, Nellie Malone from Fifth and Stone, With a Banjo on my Knee, Thought of a Sundrenched Elsewhere, What’s Your Road, Man?, The Love You Make, Don’t Get me Started, Your Fifteen Minutes, All Our Secrets are the Same, Minding other People’s Business, A Day in the Life of a Writer, and A Life of the Spirit. This part identifies the different sources—yourself, family, country, hobbies, likes and dislikes, relationships, emotions, other peoples interests, etc.—from where you can generate ideas for your writing and explains how to do it. It also offers numerous prompts to get you started. It is one of the most interesting sections of the book and will help you in writing many stories and essays than you ever thought possible.

Part III (Finding Form) contains five chapters—Of Sonnets and Toasters, Fools Like You, The Shape of Thing to Come, It All Depends on Your Point of View, Other Rooms, Other Voices, Vast is the Power of Cities, It was the Best of Times, A Sort of Miracle. This part deals with choosing your form, how to create and develop characters, how to deal with space and time, how to tell the story, who should tell the story, ho to create great openings and endings, etc.

Part IV (Assessing and Developing) contains four chapters—What’s at Stake, Sitting Still, Tell it Slant, and Anything is Beautiful if You Say it is. In this section, the author introduces the finer points of the craft of writing like adding details, introducing symbols, not telling everything, and so on.

This is a book that is quite useful for a beginner. It gives a lot of practical advice and the prompts will help one find topics and generate ideas for writing and make writing a daily routine. A book worth reading and there are some real gems that will be useful for all.

Book Details:

• Author: Jack Heffron
• Publisher: Writer’s Digest Books
• Edition & Year: First, 2000
• ISBN: 9781582971797
• Cover & Page Count: Paperback, 262 Pages

[Note: This is the first draft of the book. I would require your comments, suggestions and feedback to make the book more useful, interesting, and as error free as possible. Please send your comments, suggestions and feedback to me.]

The book publishing process will vary considerably from publisher to publisher. But the phases given in this section will be present in most cases. Every book starts as an idea. The idea could be that of the author or the publisher. If the book is the author’s idea, the author will approach the publisher. If the book idea occurred to the publisher, the publisher will find a suitable author.

Irrespective of the source of the idea, the author will have to write a book proposal, which will contain the details of how he would like to go about writing the book. It will contain a synopsis, detailed table of contents, expected time for completion, approximate number of chapters, pages, and artwork. In many cases the proposal will also contain sample chapters of the proposed book.

The book proposal is given to the publisher or an acquisitions editor of the publishing house. The proposal is usually reviewed by subject experts who will give their opinion on various areas like whether the book will sell (if yes, how many), what topics need to be included, what topics need to removed, what topics need to be expanded and so on. Usually, the proposal is reviewed by three experts and if two of them give the nod, the book is accepted. The acquisitions editor will also check for other details like quality of writing, the author’s credentials, etc. He/she will determine whether the schedules are in order and the cost of production will be covered by the revenue generated by the projected sales.

Once the proposal is accepted, the publisher will offer the contract to the author. Once the contract is signed, the author starts working on the book. The author and the acquisitions editor would have agreed on time schedules, milestones, and deliverables.

The author will deliver the completed chapters to the editor as per the schedule. These chapters are given to the technical reviewer. The technical reviewer will be a person who is an authority on the subject. The technical reviewer would review the book for correctness and clarity. The author would have to answer the queries posed by the reviewer and make revisions if required.

Once the technical review is over for all the chapters, the author should submit the manuscript to the publisher. The manuscript and the accompanying artwork would have to be submitted in the format specified by the publisher. The publisher will send the manuscript for copyediting. The copyeditor will check for grammatical errors, clarity, uniformity, consistency and other technical flaws. The copyedited manuscript is returned to the author. The author should go through the changes marked and decide to accept them or not. In this case the author usually has the final say.

Once the copyediting changes are approved and necessary revisions are completed, the author sends it back to the publisher who in turn sends it for typesetting. At the same time, the cover designer will start designing the cover. There cover designer will produce one or more designs and would send it to the author, editor and publisher for inputs and approval. The selected cover design is sent to for printing.

In the meanwhile, the typesetter would design the layout for the book and would convert the manuscript (the text and illustrations) into the new layout. The publisher will send the galley proofs (formatted pages of the manuscript) to the author for review. The galley proof process is essentially a last chance to make small changes and look for typographical errors. The author reviews the galley proofs, makes corrections (if any), and prepares the index and preliminary pages (preface, acknowledgements, dedication, etc.) and sends them back to the publisher.

During the final stages, the marketing department will sent out brochures and other information about the book to influential people and potential buyers. They will try to get the book reviewed by experts. The strategy is to create awareness about the book and also to influence the potential buyers. The author also promotes the book through personal websites, blogs, and other networking sites.

The publisher sends the corrected galley proofs and other material for printing. The book and the cover are printed and bound. They are packed and send to the distributors or bookshops. The book reaches the bookshops and the readers who in turn decide the fate of the book.

[Note: This is the first draft of the book. I would require your comments, suggestions and feedback to make the book more useful, interesting, and as error free as possible. Please send your comments, suggestions and feedback to me.]

[Source: http://www.mantex.co.uk/samples/rules.htm]

Brooks is a software engineer and computer scientist, best known for managing the development of OS/360, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book “The Mythical Man-Month.” Mythical Man-Month changed the way software was developed and Brooks’s law became one of the most important laws of software project management and Brooks became a cult figure in the software engineering field.

Humphrey is also a software engineer, key thinker in the discipline of software engineering, and is often called the father of software quality. His books Managing the Software Process and A Discipline for Software Engineering are ‘must reads’ for software engineers.

Weinberg is author or co-author of several hundred articles and more than 30 books. In 1971 he published the book The Psychology of Computer Programming, which is considered by many the beginning of the study of software engineering as human behavior.

Davis is a software engineer and has held numerous teaching and consulting positions in various organizations and universities around the world. He has written five books and in 2006 his book 201 Principles of Software Development was voted by ACM members as one of the 20 classic computer science books.

McConnell is an author of many software engineering textbooks including Code Complete, Rapid Development, and Software Estimation. In 1998, McConnell was named as one of the three most influential people in the software industry by Software Development Magazine, along with Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds. Code Complete is considered as a software engineer’s Bible.

What is the secret behind the phenomenal success of these authors? Their books have passed the test of time and remain as bestsellers. They continue to influence the new generation of software engineers as they did the earlier generations. Their lecture tours are fully booked and they speak before jam-packed audiences.

These authors are great speakers and excellent in written and oral communication; they have the ability to explain and illustrate complex topics in simple terms that even a novice can understand; they have comprehensive knowledge of their areas of specialization; they have years of experience in dealing with real-life problems (both technical and management) and solving them; they continue to learn; they contribute immensely to the development of the profession by teaching, mentoring, and writing; and they work real hard.

If a person has all these attributes and if he or she decides to write a book, the chances of that book becoming a success are very high. The reason is that the book such a person write will be interesting, easy-to-read and understand, engaging, and will give practical know-how and wisdom that a professional can right away apply to his/her work.

In this book we will see how to write a book that will be interesting, engaging, readable and of practical value. We will examine the successful authors and their secrets and will find out how some people continue to write bestsellers while majority of the professionals do not even think about writing a book.

[Note: This is the first draft of the book. I would require your comments, suggestions and feedback to make the book more useful, interesting, and as error free as possible. Please send your comments, suggestions and feedback to me.]

In this book you will find comprehensive information about how to write technical books. You will find tips and tricks, tool and techniques, software and hardware resources, etc. that will assist you in becoming more productive. You will find strategies and techniques that will help you in marketing the book better and making it popular. You will also find information about how to make extra income and how to move up the career.

The tips, techniques and strategies discussed in this book are applicable to all who write technical books. The examples and case studies in the book will be mainly from computer science, information technology and management fields as they are my areas of specialization. But that will not prevent the readers from other fields (say medicine, commerce, or chemistry) in understanding the book as the examples will be generic and I will not be using any jargon.

This is not a site on how to get your book published. Even though the issues like how to find a publisher, how to write the winning book proposal forms and synopses, what are things that you should be aware of in the contract, etc. are covered, they are not the main objective of this book.

The primary audience of this book, as mentioned earlier, is people who are writing or are planning to write a book—a technical book. It will provide you information about how to organize and structure your book, how to add value to the information that you are providing, how to research and write more efficiently and effectively, and so on. It will make you more productive so that you can finish the books faster without compromising on the quality. The book will arm you with information and tools that will help you in improving the quality, visibility, and sales of the book.

I wish you all the very best in your writing endeavors and hopes that the inputs and knowledge that you gain from the book will help in making your book a bestseller.

[Note: This is the first draft of the book. I would require your comments, suggestions and feedback to make the book more useful, interesting, and as error free as possible. Please send your comments, suggestions and feedback to me.]