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I’m on a 4 day streak, after messing up a 36 day streak of writing daily on 750words.com. Sigh. Why did I mess up? Too many family issues going on. If you’re writing 750 words daily, too, part of the goal is to learn to think like a writer. Character relationships are important to establish, [...]
Writing during the Christmas holidays can be difficult. There’s too much to do, too much living to do! Here are some simple low-stress projects to keep you going. Just have fun with these! Show-Don’t-Tell with Sensory Go sit at a mall, beside a seasonal skating rink, at a holiday concert. Notice the sensory details of [...]
Here’s a question from a reader: Is it ok to use dialogue to tell the main character about the fantasy world she just entered via her sidekick who lives there? I’m not sure how else to do it. Is there such a thing as too much dialogue? Thanks for the question! Where to Include Exposition [...]
When writing a novel, picture book or other story, there are sentence constructions you should avoid and revise out when you copyedit. Here’s my top 5 list of the Worst Sentence Constructions. Would Example: We would take walks daily. We would start at our house and we would go toward the lake and then we [...]
30 Days to a Stronger Scene Table of Contents Featured Today in Fiction Notes Stores Teen Fantasy EBook: All Dialogue Scenes? Not Really What if you’re one of those writers who like to develop the conflict in dialogue. Great. It’s a popular technique these days. But it’s very rare to really see a scene with [...]
Classic advice to beginning fiction writers: Show, Don’t Tell. I taught several sessions to teachers last week and they all nodded. Great advice. But how do you DO that in practical terms? How do you teach students to Show, Don’t Tell? Show, Don’t Tell: Why? In the old days of storytelling, it was fine to [...]
A Gold Mine Awaits in Your File Drawers Take a good look at the files in your file drawers! You could be rich by mining those drawers. There are snatches of dialogue, character sketches, interesting anecdotes, tons of research and facts on obscure things. For example, from my research for novels, I can tell you [...]
12 Ways to Start a Novel First lines. We all obsess over our novel’s first lines, and rightly so, because from it the rest of the story must flow naturally and without a pause. Here are 10 strategies to use on first lines for your novel. I’ve illustrated them with the “100 Best Lines from [...]
Doing the character checklist this week, I realized that I hadn’t written much about dialogue. Oh, I have a couple times.
Does your Scene Pass this Checklist? Where/When. (Setting) Did you orient the reader at the beginning of the scene? Does the reader know where this takes place: room in house, city, state, country, etc? Does the reader know when this takes place: time of day, season of year, place within chronology of story? If the [...]
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