If you want to write better action scenes, the key isn’t just what you include—it’s what you leave out. Nothing kills momentum faster than a poorly timed info dump or an overstuffed description that stops the action in its tracks. Pacing is everything, and knowing how to control it can mean the difference between a […]
November 5, 2018 by 55 Comments How to Become a WriterWhen Writing, How Do You Know When Enough Is Enough?
Last month, I invited you to tell me what topics you’d like me to write about. You flooded my inbox and comments section with suggestions. (I scheduled this as an “easy” post that wouldn’t require much maintenance while I was in the midst of the a big move. When I logged on that first day to […]
February 26, 2018 by 79 Comments ProseDon’t Write Scenes–Write Images
When you think about it, the transformative power of the written word is no less phenomenal than the technological miracles of computers, televisions, and smarts phones. Both are alchemy. Technology uses wires and circuits to turn code into the wonder of light and color. Writing does exactly the same thing. Little black squiggles on the […]
November 13, 2017 by 25 Comments How to Become a Writer5 (Not-So-Little) Additions to the Great Novel-Writing Checklist
Learning how to write a successful novel is largely a matter of memorizing and mentally tracking the vast number of “parts” that make a story run. Honestly, this alone is sometimes the hardest part of the entire job. There’s a lot to remember—which is why, today, we’re going to look at the second part of our […]
April 24, 2017 by 58 Comments Description3 Ways to Make Your Writing More Visual
Written fiction is comparatively unique among art forms. Why? Because it isn’t visual. Unlike theater, dance, painting, sculpture, and photography, writing offers no inherent visual images. And yet, as any reader can tell you, reading a good story is a tremendously visual experience. This means you, as the writer, bear an important responsibility to make […]
April 3, 2017 by 89 Comments Most Common Writing MistakesMost Common Writing Mistakes, Pt. 58: Too Much Description
Sooner or later, most writers will get their hands slapped over description, whether it’s too much description or too little. The bad news is that this is a big deal in narrative fiction. Get the balance of your description wrong, and it could throw off your entire story. The good news is that once you understand how […]
February 17, 2016 by 55 Comments DescriptionHack Your Readers’ Brains by Describing the Five Senses
“It was a dark and stormy night…” Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s the Snoopy-at-his-typewriter iconic opening line of melodramatic English literature. But read the whole paragraph from Sir Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford and then let me ask you a question. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except […]
January 4, 2016 by 47 Comments Story SettingsMost Common Mistakes Series, Pt. 47: Ineffective Setting Descriptions
You can’t write a good setting without a good description. That’s the way it rolls. In written literature, what is setting if not description? How do you convey it without description of some sort? For something so relatively intuitive, setting descriptions can end up being surprisingly tricky to detail effectively. For one thing, you have […]
October 8, 2014 by 25 Comments DescriptionThe Power of the Senses: How to Fire Up Any Story Description
As writers, it is our job to give our readers a powerful emotional experience, via story description. Many emotions come about because one or more of our five senses has been stimulated, so one way to elicit emotions is to “awaken” your readers’ senses. Sight is probably the easiest sense to incorporate, because when you are […]
September 10, 2014 by 93 Comments DescriptionHow to Write a Gut-Wrenching Tragic Scene–Thanks to One Surprising Detail!
This week’s video contains a confession from me, slightly counter-intuitive advice on how to write a tragic scene, and an absolutely spot-on example from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Video Transcript: I have to start off this video with a confession. Within the last month or so, I stumbled across a fantastic quote of writing advice, […]
