Fiction Notes

Tag: how to write a novel

  • Christmas Eavesdropping

    Notes from the Field During the holidays, it’s hard to concentrate on a story. But it’s not hard to BE a writer. As you go to gatherings of friends and families, one thing you can do is EAVESDROP! In your story, you want dialogue to sound natural. One way to study dialogue is to just […]

  • Chase: A Fast-Paced Plot

    My current WIP novel has a subplot of a chase, which is one of the 29 possible plot templates. Chase Plots are pretty straight forward. There’s a person chasing and a person being chased, the Chaser and the Victim. It’s an action plot, not a character plot (though always, character should be as strong as […]

  • Your Novel’s Welcome Mat: Intriguing Titles

    Welcome Mat: Your Novel’s Title When you are brainstorming titles, think of it as a welcome mat. A title’s job is to bring readers into your novel, story, or picture book. This is why the title is often changed by

  • Nail Your Novel

    Review of Nail Your Novel by Roz Morris British author and writing teacher Roz Morris has a new book out just in time to help you with that first draft of your new novel. You know, the one you’re going to write in November for National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo. Hiccups in […]

  • First page: An Editor Discusses Why It is Important

    First Page: So much from so few words At the AR-SCBWI fall retreat this weekend, Alexandra Penfold, Associate Editor of S&S took us through a discussion of first pages of our novel mss. She commented on the pages, then opened the discussion for other comments or questions. Here are some observations on the discussions (Note: […]

  • revision difficulties

    Issues I Must Deal With in This Novel Revision How’s your novel revision going, Darcy? Big v. little issues. I work for a while to clarify in my mind the big structural issues, then work on a single chapter of the novel, making it fit that overall structure. But at some point,