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4 Ways to Deal with Narrative Summaries
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…
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3 Types of Character Arcs: Choose the Best for Your Novel
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…
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How to Foreshadow
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,…
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7 Writing Tips from the 3 Kings
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! As our holiday gift to you, We are offering all 5 Winter and Holiday Writing…
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1000 Competing Ideas & Tasks
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…
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30 Days to Stronger Scenes Series: TOC
What has the most potential for improving your writing? Learning to write a strong scene; then making sure every scene in your story is strong. It’s not mandatory—there are good books written without strong scenes—but I find that beginning to intermediate writers are more likely to succeed with a strong scene structure. Fiction Notes works…