Pam Binder, center, speaks at our informal February Meeting.

Romance-fantasy writer Pam Binder entertained our February meeting with informal advice for writers. Pam is an award-winning author of fantasy time travel novels. Publisher’s Weekly has lauded Pam’s writing for the way it “gracefully weaves humor, magic and romantic tension.” She was included in the anthology, “A Season in the Highlands,” which hit the New York Times best-seller list in 2000. Her most recent novel, “My Secretor Protector,” a sequel to “The Inscription,” was released last June by Pocket Books.

Pam started writing seriously in mid-life although she maintained an interest all her life but raising children and other priorities interfered. She now as several books in print and writes every day.

1. Critique groups are valuable and can help you see if what you wrote rings true. Bring new work to the groups versus something too polished because critiques are easier to tolerate for first drafts.
2. The rule of six says to edit six times before you submit something. Go through your draft from a different perspective each time, for example, check setting, dialogue, emotion, and other features of the work so each draft is approached from a different slant. My first draft is only half the length of the finished work.
3. Push yourself to keep learning the craft of writing. Take as long as you need to make it good because the work will be on the shelf forever.
4. Read outside your genre to keep fresh and get new ideas. Don’t just rely on what you did in the past. You never know what information might be useful to your writing later.
5. A good process to follow is to use different colors of index cards for each plot in your book. Put a plot point on each card and then you can see where you have too little or too much and how to sprinkle the various plots throughout the book to keep the story moving. This frees you up to write in scenes versus sequentially. Write the scene you are excited about at the moment to keep life in your writing.
6. I have the plot down before the characters. I then decide what characters are needed to fulfill the story. Some writers start with the characters. Use whichever works best for you.