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When you write or revise a novel, you must pay careful attention to the first chapter. Opening Chapters of Novels MUST Accomplish These Goals Grab your readers attention. Something must grab the reader’s attention immediately. This can be an unusual use of language, a unique voice, a startling action, a bit of dialogue, an active [...]
That first meeting, we were asked what challenges we face as writers, what burden we wanted lifted, what questions we wanted answered about our work.
I’m working on the first draft of a novel and I’m about 2/3 of the way through the plot, when something interesting happened. Embrace Exploration I’m at a point where the E, the main character, is house bound for a couple days and suddenly M, his friend, becomes the legs of the story, the only [...]
OK, so I recommend re-reading a mss as a revision strategy. And I practice what I preach, believe me. So, this week, I’ve been re-reading my WIP novel and struggling. Here are the problems I encountered. 5 Problems with Reading for Revision Sleepy. Yes, my novel kept putting me to sleep. Yawn. Now, it’s not [...]
I’m back in the trenches here, revising scenes. I’m looking at a single-spaced page of my current WIP. I’ve done the Scene Box Test only to find that there are four boxes on this single page. That means four scenes. Yes, a scene can be accomplished in a single sentence or single paragraph, but I [...]
Editor Requests Revision Two weeks ago, I got a revision letter from an editor about a picturebook. Hurrah! You can guess what I did. I tore the mss apart and revised and revised. I read it aloud. I reseached typical dialogue for different regional dialects, so I could personalize the characters. I sharpened the conflict. [...]
Novel Diagnosis Series Introduction Characters Dialogue Scenes Voice VoiceRevisited Plot After a couple days off for the Phoenix retreat, I’m returning today to the Novel Diagnosis series with a discussion identifying major plot elements. Plot consists of the story’s events that build upon each other to lead to a resolution of a conflict. This means [...]
Novel Diagnosis Series Introduction Characters Dialogue Scenes Voice VoiceRevisited Plot It’s been interesting trying to find ways to easily diagnose novel problems with short, easy-to-do activities. I’ve written lots here about Voice, but I’ve never thought about a short activity to diagnose how well you’re doing. So, this is a proposal and I’d be interested [...]
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