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I just named some characters, Jane and John Smith. What does that say about these characters? Do you think boring? No, no, think alias. Think clueless that such an alias might be too transparently an alias. What would make them so clueless? Ah, you’re getting interested in my characters just from their names? One hopes [...]
I am thinking about doing NaNoWriMo this year, joining with thousands of others in trying to write 50,000 words–a novel–during the month of November. You can’t count any words written before November 1, but I know I can’t do this if I don’t work on a plot before the mad rush officially begins. So far, [...]
Character Emotions MUST Spill Out into Big Actions Characters, even supporting characters, should be bigger than life. No flat characters. Fiction demands round, “fleshed-out” characters. I’m working on a revision and I know this. Yet, when a friend read my revision, her response was that I needed big actions for my characters. In the revision, [...]
OK, so I have this revision to do and one key element of it is to deepen characterization and relationships. Uh, oh. My weakness! How did the editor know that it was my weak area? Even after spending agonizing hours on characterization, I’m still not hitting the mark. Which left me stumped on this revision. [...]
So What? That’s the question you must get past in your fiction. Why should a reader care? Keep Reader’s Interest: Make Everything Matter More The best way to make a reader care about your story, your novel is to make things matter more, put more at risk, up the stakes. Personal Stakes This can be [...]
Creating Suspense to Strengthen the Narrative Arc Great novels grab your attention and never let it go until the reader looks up from reading, “The End.” That’s a given. But it’s not always easy to grab that reader’s attention. What you need is suspense. Suspense is created by an uncertainty about what happens next in [...]
Amy Holder debuts with THE LIPSTICK LAWS Introduced first in 2007, debut children’s authors have formed a cooperative effort to market their books. I featured Revision Stories from the Classes of 2k8 and 2k9 and this feature returns this year with the Class of 2k11. Class of 2008 Class of 2009 MORE 2k11 Guest post [...]
How Does Your Character Change? You know your character must change somehow over the course of your novel. But how? And more than that, how do you sync the changes with the external plot? The middle of a novel can suffer from the dreaded “sagging middle” and it’s mainly because you don’t have a firm [...]
Character’s Job Affects Your Novel When you think about a character’s profession or job, what are you looking for? Stand out. Usually, you want something that will stand out. Maybe taxidermist, taxi driver, armored car driver. The ch Implications of the Job. Think carefully about the implications of the job. This might be considering the [...]
Which camp do you fall into? Do you plan your novel extensively before you write a single word? Or, do you improvise as you go along? A friend is starting a new novel at the same time I’m working on a new novel and it’s interesting to see the difference in our approach. Character. He’s [...]
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