The Dog, the Chicken and the Boxer Shorts: Real Events Inspire Novel Events

Stealing from Life: You Can’t Make this Up
I was talking to my friend, LFP, and he told me about a funny thing that happened on the way to work.
It started with a retriever. LFP reads electric meters in a rural area, driving a company truck from house to deer camp to trailer to house. Yesterday, [...]

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 PlotAnatomy 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 [...]

Revising in the Home Stretch

Revising in the Home Stretch
I know what method of working has made the first 2/3 of my mss better. I’m just getting tired.
Don’t get Lazy Now! I’m on the last third. I know that I must rewrite a major scene for a subplot/secondary character climax. But much of these later chapter are in good [...]

Scene Tweaks

How to Tweak a Scene
When revising a novel, it’s essential to check each scene and tweak it so the reader stays interested. Here’s an example.
Scene: Choosing Paint Color
In this relatively minor scene the Main Character (MC) comes home to find Mom and the Painter choosing paint colors. Painter has been making minor repairs and it’s [...]

Active Protagonists

Still working on revising my WIP novel, scene by scene. In the novel’s scene I just worked on, the main character is sitting at a school assembly. It’s an important assembly which sets up the main point of the story; however, as in most such assemblies, the action of the novel’s scene takes place on [...]

Goal disaster in Novel Revision

A scene goal must have a showdown
I’m revising my WIP novel and I’m at the end of the first section of the story. In this section, my character lays out a specific goal, and of course,

Opening Chapters

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 description [...]

Big Scenes

Every Novel Needs a Scene
In my WIP, I need to write a big scene: cast of dozens, culmination of major plot threads, emotional high for major characters.
Big scenes should be a part of every novel, because there should be places where characters, plot events, outer and inner narratives arcs, and subplots intersect. The [...]

Rosanne Parry: 2k9

This entry is part 1 of 10 in the series 2k9Rosanne Parry, debuts with Heart of a Shepherd
Order from Amazon.
Introduced first in 2007, debut children’s authors have formed a cooperative effort to market their books. Last year, I featured many of the Class of 2k8 on Revision Notes, as they told the stories [...]