Visit Athena Critique Services for our weekly writing tip. View our schedule of online writing workshops and check out our reasonably priced critique services. Our store provides direct links to our list of recommended writing books. We also have unique gear for writers at our newly opened Café Press Store.

Teresa is an experienced workshop presenter who has done live presentations at the New Jersey Writers Romance Writers “Put Your Heart in a Book” Conference (2005) and the RWA National Conference in Atlanta (2006). She has also presented numerous online workshops for HTHRW and RWA Online Chapter. Her teaching experience also includes teaching law students at the University of Montana, Santa Clara University in California and Western New England School of Law in Massachusetts and over ten years as a Girl Scout trainer. She is certified by Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. as an Instructor of Trainers.

Contact Teresa if you are interested in any of these workshops for your group either online or in person. And watch her Appearances page for upcoming scheduled workshop presentations.

You’re writing the novel of your heart--you don’t have time to worry about legal issues, right? Think again. Author’s contracts put most, if not all, of the burden on the author to assure that the content of that novel doesn’t infringe someone else’s rights. In other words--if someone sues over your story--you will most likely be footing the legal bill. Lawsuits are expensive. Doing what you can to avoid having to sue, or be sued can save you money, energy and time. It is well worth your while to understand your legal rights and potential liability.

This workshop focuses on the major areas where authors can get themselves into legal trouble. Part One is devoted to copyright with a brief look at trademark. Part Two covers tort liability, including libel and related legal concepts that are all designed to protect individual or corporate name, image and reputation. This workshop is presented in an interactive format that gives participants a chance to compare their opinions with those of actual judges.

PDF handout for Legal Issues For Writers.

This workshop will consider different techniques for keeping your story moving forward while providing the reader with crucial information about the past—including flashbacks, weaving backstory into narrative or dialogue and internal monologue.

Great heroes are like chocolate--luscious, good for nibbling and available in a variety of fillings. Using examples from books and movies the presenters start with the basic testosterone driven male to find the hero within. Whether he's a bad boy or smooth-talking charmer, a reluctant hero or a take-charge warrior every hero must have strength, compassion, determination, courage and the flaws that make him human. The author can mix, blend and measure these traits to make her hero unique.

This workshop looks beyond the Alpha/Beta debate to consider what at makes a hero satisfying for his heroine? How can the author best portray those heroic traits?

Lecture and exercises focus on physical description, mannerisms, dialogue and love scenes. Online participants will have the opportunity to submit brief assignments for critique.

PDF handout for Creating The Yummy Hero.

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If you are writing fiction in the hope that it will one day published, you probably wonder what your rights are under the law. Copyright is a complex subject that covers a wide range of creative works, but you don't have to be a lawyer to understand these basic concepts:

1. How is copyright created?
2. What is copyrightable?
3. What is fair use?

Copyright is entirely a creation of law. It is different from plagiarism—which is a moral principle. If I take Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet, and publish it with my name as “author” I have plagiarized the work because it is not my creation. But I haven't violated any copyright because Romeo and Juliet is so old that it is in the public domain, in fact all works originally published before 1923 fall into this category. Works created and first published between January 1, 1923 and December 31, 1963 may have fallen into the public domain. The only way to find out is to research the status of the specific work. Other things that are in the public domain in the U.S. include documents created by the U.S. government.

On the other hand, if you copy this article and print it in a book, or post it on your website without my permission—you have violated my copyright even if you properly attribute the article to me. Why? Because this article is protected by copyright. An original work is copyrighted at the moment of creation—as soon as it is fixed in a “tangible medium of expression”. This can be a digital medium—a disk, computer hard drive—this website. Or it can mean writing it on paper—a poem scrawled on a restaurant napkin is copyrighted as is a haiku scratched onto a rock.

Copyright does not depend on having a copyright notice, or registering the work with the copyright office. It is a good idea to place a notice on your work, as I have done with this article, because it does give notice of your intention to anyone who looks at the work. A copyright notice makes it clear that you are reserving your rights and don't want your work copied or used without your permission. Registration in the U.S. Copyright Office is also valuable. If your work is registered you will be eligible for statutory damages and attorneys fees, should you succeed in an infringement law suit. But neither registration, nor a notice is required for copyright protection to attach to your work.

All that is necessary is that the work be fixed and original. The word “original” as used in the copyright law is a term of art that is somewhat different from our ordinary use of the word. It means first of all that I created the work. For example, I couldn't take my edition of Romeo and Juliet mentioned above and obtain a copyright for it because all I did was copy Shakespeare's words. If I take Shakespeare's play and add original illustrations, special annotations, or an original commentary I can copyright those original things I added to the work, though I still wouldn't have a copyright in Shakespeare's words.

The term original also means that the work must be more than a mere idea. It must be an original creative work. Take my novel, Loving Mercy, a western historical romance. It started out as an idea: create a role reversal story, set in the American west with a strong female heroine and a hero who needs her help. That idea is not copyrightable—you could create your own novel based on the same idea without infringing my copyright in Loving Mercy. My novel became an original creative work, worthy of copyright protection when I created an entire world—characters, setting, plot. A mere idea is not copyrightable, but a detailed outline, for example, would be. You cannot copy my original work without my permission.

Obviously you can't take the book down to your local copy center, photocopy it and distribute it. This is true even if you distribute it for free. It is still infringement even when you don't profit from your copying! Between writing an original work that happens to be based the same idea and copying the work in its entirety there is a vast fuzzy area where infringement issues may be difficult to parse out. That is the subject for another article. Pure copying is easier to detect. But Loving Mercy is 314 pages long. Suppose you only wanted to use a scene, a paragraph, a sentence? There is a concept called “fair use” that allows some use--direct copying--that would not be considered infringement.

Whether a use qualifies as “fair use” depends on two things. The purpose of the use and the extent of the use. Like many concepts in the law, there is no bright line test that tells you, for example—over 50 words is infringement, while 49 words or less is fair use. First you consider the purpose. In general more leeway is given to educational use, whereas use for profit is not favored. Thus a teacher using parts of my book in his classroom would be given more leeway than, say another writer copying passages of the book in a work intended to be sold for profit.

Suppose you are a reviewer who wants to include a short excerpt from the book in your review—or as a side-bar to the review. Your publication is a for profit magazine, but literary criticism, like education, is a favored use. The reviewer will be safe in publishing a brief excerpt. The safe thing for the magazine is to obtain permission to publish the excerpt. After all the publication of the excerpt is good promotion for the book, so this permission would be granted, no harm in asking. But the use for purposes of review of a page or two out of a 314 page book is going to be fair use even if it is done without the copyright owner's permission.

Turn the example around and assume that I want to quote the review of my book for promotional purposes. If the review is one page long and I quote the entire thing, I'm probably infringing. Why? Because I've quoted a substantial part of the work. For a 200 word review, I probably need to keep my quote down to 20 or 30 words. That haiku etched into the rock? Quoting a line from a song in you novel? Get permission.

In summary, your original work is copyrighted at the moment of creation—not the moment the light bulb goes off above your head, but as soon as the work is developed enough to be considered an original work and is “fixed” by any means technology allows in a “tangible medium of expression”. Copying any part of the work is infringement, though copying a small portion of the work may be fair use in certain circumstances. In general it is best to have permission to quote any portion of another work.

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