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In our continuing quest to write 750 words per day for a month, today we will look at unlikeable main characters. Here’s the thing: readers need to LIKE your character. Why else would they spend hours walking in their shoes? But what if your character is in mental anguish, or like to hurt puppies, or [...]
I am trying to keep up with my friend, Charlie, who has ridden his bike over 25 miles a day for over 3000 consecutive days. I want to write 750 words a day and I’m using 750words.com to keep track of everything. The point of this exercise is to make sure I am Thinking Like [...]
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, [...]
This month, I am trying to Think Like a Writer and write 750 words a day, practicing my writing, much like a musician plays scales daily. When you introduce a character, do you say something like this? John Doe, age 37, trotted down the street. The question is how old is the character and how [...]
Book Trailer: Archived Video and Purchased Music Today, I’m officially unveiling a new book trailer for Prairie Storms, my nonfiction picture book. I’ve done tons of research for the past two years ago and wrote The BookTrailer Manual, which will be totally revised in time for the 13th annual SCBWI Winter conference on January 27, [...]
In today’s installation of Think Like a Writer, we’ll look at creating a certain mood for your story, novel, or picture book. Writers know that readers want a certain experience and part of that is creating emotion or feeling. In other words, we need to create a setting that has a certain mood. How to [...]
The Think Like a Writer series continues here with an exhortation to continue thinking in sensory details, the basic exercise of any writer. Today, think about how a person moves as a way to characterize him or her. Action and Metaphors of Action She is as lithe as a jaguar. That simile evokes a certain [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
We all know that a character must grow throughout the course of a novel. But how do they grow and how do you Show-Don’t-Tell that growth? It helps to know the beginning and ending points. And often, I like going straight for the end to see where I’m aiming. Let’s say that a person needs [...]
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