8 Ways to Enrich Your Character

Character Revision: 8 Ways to Jumpstart a Make Over
You have a first draft, but you realize that your character needs work. How do you retrofit a character when you revise?
I don’t think of a personality transplant. Instead, I try to add to and enrich a character. Here are 8 suggestions on how to revise your [...]

Establish the Emotional Arc

As I’m working on the plan for this new novel, creating characters and trying out voices, I’m trying to strengthen my weakest areas.
My Weakness is Character
My weakness is character. I can plot fine, but creating characters with plausible character growth is hard for me. I think I’ve got it and my friends tell me that [...]

Are You in Pain?

Are you in Pain? Question for your character.
So, I’m sitting at the hosptial, waiting for my husband to follow in Harry Smith’s footsteps and get the Couric Procedure (screening colonoscopy). Every wall has a sign asking, “Are you in pain?

0 No Pain/Happy face

Shrunken Manuscript Reveals Novel’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Shrunken Manuscript Technique Helps Visualize Problems
Following my directions for shrinking, marking and evaluating a novel, here are some recent examples:

10 Checkpoints for Scenes

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 [...]

Dissect a Scene

This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series Build a Stronger Plot
Anatomy of a Scene
If you dissect a scene, what do you find? Sandra Scofield, in The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer lays out a simple, yet insightful discussion of this concept and it’s usefulness to a novelist.
Here are the [...]

book trailer criteria

Memoir of a Successful Book Trailer in Six Words
by guest Lisa Gottfried of DigitalWeavers.com
NOTE: Lisa did the editing for my retreat video. She spoke at the San Rafael conference and I was interested enough to try her services, for which I paid. This is an invited guest post and she speaks here as a professional [...]

Touchstones

Touchstones: a reader’s way into your story
In this guest post by Martha Brockenbrough, grammarian, freelance writer, columnist, and author discusses how to pluck the heartstrings of your reader.
When I worked as a freelancer for a company that created really special games—games designed to draw out the best talents of each player—I learned [...]

Don’t Avoid the Emotion

I’m near the end of this draft of my novel and I’m reluctant to face the last few chapters. Why? Too much emotion!
You must write the emotional ending
It’s not fair to the reader to have his/her turn the page and read. “I woke up the next morning and thought about what happened last night.”
You [...]

Sports: Passionate characters

Sports books are action-oriented, fast-paced and full of memorable characters; but the core of a sports book–fiction or non-fiction–is people. Characters make sports interesting. Granted, these characters are constantly on the move and not inclined to deep musings about life. Yet, it is the character interacting with the unique aspects of a sports novel that [...]