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How to Write a Children’s Picture Book
What are your favorite children’s picture books? Are they books you remember from your childhood? Are they books you read to your kids? Picture books, maybe more than any other literary genre, call up fond memories. Sharing a picture book with your parents or with your kids–it’s more than just a book. It’s an experience,…
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Artistic Vision Determines Novel Revision: How to Tell the Story You Want to Tell
Learning from a Different Art Form Lately, I’ve been studying photography. My husband upgraded to a newer, fancier SLR camera, so I got his hand-me-down Canon Rebel, which is great for learning. And I’m learning a lot about my creative process, which comes back to tell me things about my writing. Let me try to…
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OOPS! Continuity in Your Novel
Let’s say that Marilyn is introduced in Chapter 1 of your novel as a blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty. But in Chapter 10 when she reappears, she’s a brunette. Oops! It’s a break in continuity. How does that happen? I was once in a school library where the librarian was administering Accelerated Reader tests, which text a…
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Dialogue: 4 Ways it Goes Wrong
Dialogue is an essential part of fiction, the way an author shows a character through what s/he says. And it’s so easy to get it wrong. Here are some ways dialogue goes wrong and what to do about it. Trivial. When character talk to each other, the reader doesn’t need to listen to the trivial,…
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Expert Help: Defeat the Black Hole
Everyone knows that you can’t defeat a black hole. Right? But what if you’re writing a science fiction story and you NEED your characters to defeat the black hole. Um. Hard. Your readers won’t go there with you, unless. . . Seek Experts That’s exactly the situation I found myself in. I had set up…
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Character Thoughts: Direct and Indirect Interior Monologues
The infamous Show-Don’t-Tell mantra fails to take into account the importance of character thoughts. If you purely do action, dialogue and description, you have few tools to let the reader know the character’s inner life. Instead, you need to include thoughts at some point. Direct Interior Monologue When a character is thinking about something you…