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Science Fiction and Fantasy Worldbuilding: Timeline Adds Crucial Details
One of the first tasks in revising my current WIP has been to nail down a firm time line for my story. When does all this stuff happen? I had it vaguely placed in the 21st century, but I didn’t want to nail it down specifically. It’s the EveryMan problem. Some writers try to create […]
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Top 20 Middle Grade Agents: 129 Sales in the Last 12 Months
What agents are selling middle grade novels? Publishersmarketplace.com does a great job of monitoring the business of selling manuscripts to publishers. If you’re looking for an agent, you’ll want to spend a lot of time there doing research on agents to find the perfect match for you and your stories. Here’s just one way to […]
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Scenes: The Skeleton of a Novel
You’re a human being: you can stand up, sit down, or do a somersault. That’s because you have a skeleton that gives your soft tissue a structure. Likewise, it’s important to give your novel a structure that will hold all the soft murmurings about characters, places and events. It begins with understanding the structure of […]
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Openings: 5 Ways They Go Wrong
Openings are incredibly important. This was brought back to me recently as I was judging a contest. Those manuscripts that kept my interest for three pages were rare. Usually, they lost me by the middle of page two! Am I harsh? I don’t think so. Grab the Reader with Your Opening Lines Noah Lukeman has […]
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Tone: Is your Romance Sensual or Intellectual?
I am currently reading Eleanor and Park, a YA romance; one of the interesting things about this story is the author’s choice to create a sensual tone. It’s not sexy or intellectual. The choice of tone is interesting because often a romance can devolve into physical stuff of sex. Instead, Rowell walks a fine line […]
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Storytelling: One Surprising Approach to Plotting
Plotting is probably the hardest thing I do. I can explain to you 29 different plot templates. And I often write about plotting a novel. Theory, I know. And I know that I can plot a story pretty well. It’s just HARD. The problem is that there are a series of inter-connected scenes which build […]