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Here’s another creative writing prompt for your 750 words, a challenge to write 750 words each day in January to better Think Like a Writer. Time in a story, a novel is important. How do you show time and the passage of time? This can be done in three ways: As an exercise in a [...]
Have you signed up for 750words.com yet? Or will you try doing 750 words on paper? I’ve just completed my 36th day of doing 750 words! If the first task of Think Like a Writer is to observe the world around you, the task of the fiction writer or the novelist, is to create, then [...]
I am thinking about doing NaNoWriMo this year, joining with thousands of others in trying to write 50,000 words–a novel–during the month of November. You can’t count any words written before November 1, but I know I can’t do this if I don’t work on a plot before the mad rush officially begins. So far, [...]
More on Starting a Novel Reading a wide variety of mss, I find this to be one of the weakest areas: openings. Striking just the right note is difficult. What do you include just as the curtain opens on your novel? Typical advice: Start with something exciting. Grab the reader by the throat and never [...]
Rich Prewriting Enhances Novel I’m currently researching material for my novel. Setting. I’ve sort of settled on a setting; often for me, the setting comes first. I’m looking at sequences of events, variations on those sequences, variations in how the setting might look at different times, some of the odd-ball jobs in this setting, etc. [...]
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 [...]
Last week I was wondering if I could combine two plots into one. One idea was for an Event and one for Characters. While I still think they could have meshed, the character story took off on it’s own into a short story. Now the question is what to do with the Event idea, how [...]
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 [...]
7 Children’s Picture Book Manuscripts in 7 Days I’m taking the 7 in 7 picture book challenge. Report on 7 in 7 for the first week of May, 2009 Overall: This was an interesting exercise that I’d like to repeat in a slower month, not May. Why is the Nanowrimo in November and this had [...]
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