Your story is a precision machine. If you were to take the shiny cover off this machine, what you would find inside would be an intricate mass of nuts, bolts, gears—and an engineer only knows what else. At the heart of it all, you’d find two huge pistons running the show. One of those pistons […]
October 9, 2011 by 13 Comments Structuring Your NovelReading With Attention
Reading for Plot Structure Whatever book you’re reading right this very minute, take a quick second to look in the back and see how many pages it has. Rounded, I mean. Find a scrap of paper or a used envelope and jot this down at the bottom: total number of pages. Now divide that […]
July 27, 2011 by 43 Comments Writing LifeThe 3 Mortal Sins of Fiction
Fiction is a tremendously powerful medium for sharing viewpoints and changing mindsets. Authors should never be afraid of writing about the subjects and causes in which they are passionately interested. But we also need to realize that nothing turns an audience off faster than the Three Mortal Sins: Interrupting, Apologizing, and Preaching. Often we’ll find […]
June 10, 2011 by 17 Comments Plotting Your Novel3 Easy (or Easier) Ways to Build Suspense
Recently, while writing a short story, I encountered the problem of its being too short. My editor complimented the storyline and structure but indicated something about the writing was missing. It was too short, too bland, too summative and passive instead of being descriptive and active. Finally, I found all these things centered on one […]
April 13, 2011 by 12 Comments Plotting Your NovelHow to Keep the Wrong Subplots From Sinking Your Story
Subplots are vital for many reasons. They can deepen your story’s plot and theme. They can provide contrast and resonance for the main plot. And they can give your characters and their world a feeling of verisimilitude. The wrong subplots, however, can water down your plot with parenthetical information. Writers must realize not every moment […]
February 4, 2011 by 64 Comments Editing Your NovelThe 4 Most Common Mistakes Fiction Editors See
Wouldn’t it be great if nobody ever needed an editor? If all of our stories and novels appeared in readers’ minds just as beautifully and vividly and succinctly they do in our own? Wouldn’t it be great if the story we think we’ve told were, in fact, the story we’ve told? There are more aspiring […]
August 11, 2010 by 42 Comments Plotting Your NovelHow to Spot and Leave Out the Parts That Bore Readers
Skipping the parts that bore readers should be a no-brainer. And yet this a surprisingly common pitfall. Why? To some extent, writers struggle with know what will bore readers—mostly, because we don’t all agree on what is boring. Lengthy battle scenes turn some readers off, long descriptions are dreaded by most, and I even ran across one reader […]
July 11, 2010 by 52 Comments Outlining Your Novel6 Reasons a Premise Sentence Strengthens Your Story
All stories begin with a premise (a battle in space, two people falling in love, a dog getting lost). But, often, the original conceptions are hazy and unformed. Sometimes, they’re not even a premise sentence, so much as the what-if question that will lead to a premise. What if a little boy’s brain grew too […]
June 13, 2010 by 33 Comments CharactersCreate Powerful Character Arcs in 6 Steps
The secret to a memorable character isn’t so much creating a strong personality as it is creating a strong character arc. You can come up with the most entertaining, marvelous characters imaginable, but unless you also give them powerful character arcs, their stories will lack depth and power. Character arcs are fundamentally about change. You can […]
April 28, 2010 by 19 Comments Plotting Your NovelTake Full Advantage of Your Story’s Premise
How many times have you been thrilled by a book’s amazing plot idea—only to be disappointed because the author never took advantage of the full potential of his story’s premise? Coming up with plot ideas? Easy. Setting the characters in motion? Also easy. What’s also regrettably easy, however, is watching helplessly (and sometimes obliviously) as the […]
