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Writing is rewriting Guest post by Anastasia Suen For years I have been saying that writing is rewriting, and now I have a book that shows it quite clearly, my new picture book, Road Work Ahead (Viking 2011). This picture book is short, like most of my books. It’s only 120 words, but those words [...]
One project for this summer is to revise Novel Metamorphosis: Uncommon Ways to Revise. It’s the workbook for my Novel Revision Retreat and it’s also a “retreat in a book.” This year, there are four debut novels coming out of the retreats and three so far for 2012. (BTW, I”m booking retreats now for 2012, [...]
Scenes and Narrative Summary While I’m working on ideas for a new novel, I’m also spending a couple hours a day revising an old one. For this revision, my goal is to make sure each scene is working. Some of the feedback I’ve gotten is that there’s still a bit too much Telling-instead-of-Showing. Sigh. I [...]
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 [...]
Balancing the Need for Foreshadowing I’ve been revising a mss, taking a break from doing a new project. Recent feedback told me that my novel was great, except the opening didn’t set up the “magic” of the story well enough. It was too great a shock when it suddenly occurred on about page 50. Yes, [...]
Wise Men Give Writing Tips For the last few years, Fiction Notes has offered writing tips from famous holiday or winter characters. In keeping with that tradition, we offer this year 7 writing tips from the 3 Kings. Happy Holidays! Previous Holiday Writing Tips Frosty the Snowman’s Top 6 Writing Tips Rudolph The Red Nosed [...]
Getting the Writing Done Some days are overwhelming with 1000 tasks and ideas competing for attention. How do you focus on what really needs to get done? How to you make sure the “imperative” things (those things that must be done TODAY) don’t take over the “important” things? First, make sure you know what’s important [...]
30 Days to Stronger Scenes: Table of Contents Fiction Notes works to help you write stronger, better stories that will result in a contract! Here are 30 posts about writing stronger scenes. Get regular updates from Fiction Notes Email Address Close var fnames = new Array();var ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]=’EMAIL’;ftypes[0]=’email’;fnames[1]=’FNAME’;ftypes[1]=’text’;fnames[2]=’LNAME’;ftypes[2]=’text’;fnames[3]=’MMERGE3′;ftypes[3]=’url’; try { var jqueryLoaded=jQuery; jqueryLoaded=true; [...]
10 Checkpoints for a Scene 30 Days to a Stronger Scene Table of Contents Featured Today in Fiction Notes Stores Does your Scene Pass this Checklist? We’ll wrap up this 30-day series on scenes with a checklist. Where/When. (Setting) Did you orient the reader at the beginning of the scene? Does the reader know where [...]
The Stuff Between Scenes Guest Post by Deborah Halverson Join us on Facebook for a discussion of scenes. As you give thought to what happens in your scenes, give thought, too, to what happens between them. There’s a trove of information and emotion lurking in the white space separating the last line of one scene [...]
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