What’s the fastest way to lose your readers’ trust and interest? Sprinkle your text with grammar mistakes: mess with subject-verb agreement, write only in fragments or run-ons, add apostrophes where they don’t belong, and for good measure, get creative with spelling. If, however, you want to maintain credibility, you’ll need to mop up grammar errors… Read more »
Dear Editor, I am revising my first novel, which is also the first novel in a speculative historical fiction trilogy. It has been a great joy, and I’m working on book two, so I feel pretty confident that I want to move this thing forward and that it’s worth the effort of revising. I’m having… Read more »
Okay, readers, today (and the next fourteen articles) I’m going to try something different. If you’ve read my articles before, you might remember one about outlining. In it, I mention James Scott Bell’s (JSB) idea on signposting scenes, which fuses the processes of outliners and non-outliners together—genius! Well, I’ve got even greater news. While reading… Read more »
So, you’ve written a novel. You’ve put in the time and effort. The many years. Sweat, and certainly tears. But, what now? How do you turn that mess of words into a workable story that people actually want to read? Not that I’m saying the work you’ve slaved over is a mess, but to paraphrase… Read more »
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one becomes a master.”—Ernest Hemingway Writers are, by nature, dreamers. We dream about finishing a book. Then we dream about getting an agent. A book deal. Hitting the New York Times list. On and on and on. But here’s the thing: each one of these dreams,… Read more »
Inspiration is more than reading between lines. Inspiration is about carefully dissecting lines and considering all potentialities falling between them. It is about deep considerations, personal cares and frustrations, and snippets of words watered and grown like weeds. Inspiration is what lies beneath what is most obvious. It is a spark, a flicker, and a… Read more »
Rigor. That’s a word we rarely hear. It usually lumbers into conversation alongside something dreaded, like death or school work. As soon as it shows up, people leave with vague promises to catch up later. Yet, it’s the very thing writers need to hear. Every successful writing life depends on it. The Rigorous Road Everybody’s… Read more »
Scenes are the building blocks that comprise a longer work. For novels, a scene become a sequence, which turn into acts, which build subplots, which come together to create the global story. Stories are about change. So, something must change from the beginning to the end. Robert McKee calls this the value shift. For example, in… Read more »
If you’re writing near-future science fiction involving space travel, along the lines of Andy Weir’s The Martian, or alternate history science fiction, like Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars, you’re going to find your space travel limited to what we can currently achieve. When NASA, or a similar space organization, launches a rocket loaded with… Read more »
Love may very well be the most profound emotion we’ll ever experience. Whether platonic or romantic, fleeting or lifelong, love has the power to nurture meaningful relationships, shatter our hearts, teach important lessons, and change lives forever. So it’s no wonder that love is one of the most frequently delved-into themes in literature. It defies… Read more »
