To Prologue or Not To Prologue
Should you write a prologue for your novel? I am biased, I admit, but here\’s some information to help you decide.
fiction writing
The Likability Factor
Would you want to read about someone whom you didn’t particularly like? Granted, readers have different tastes but as a rule, we readers don’t want to spend our time reading about people we dislike or find annoying.
Outlining
It’s been a rough week for me to write regularly. What started out as floor repair is now floormageddon. My house has a Gothic horror show’s worth of dust in every nook and cranny as the contractor chips up concrete and repairs the subfloor. I am looking forward to getting back to my routine…all the … Read more
More On Outlining
I’ve been continuing to work on my outline of my new book each morning for half an hour and am slowly working through each aspect of my story. I have the story idea in my head clearly, but when it gets to the nuts and bolts out outlining there is some work involved to flesh … Read more
Character Development Part 3
There are four things that readers learn when they read your book. Who What Why Why not We’ve been working on the who part for a few weeks now with the goal of populating our novels with characters that feel like real people rather than cardboard throw-away cutouts. We’ve done character bios for each one, … Read more
Writer’s Block
What is writer’s block? If you look on Wikipedia, writer’s block is a “condition.” Writer’s block is a condition, primarily associated with writing, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work, or experiences a creative slowdown. The condition ranges in difficulty from coming up with original ideas to being unable to produce a … Read more
Anatomy of a Scene
What should the last scene in your novel look like? Learn how to write that final scene well to satisfy your readers.
Scene Writing
The Writer’s Bag of Tricks Scene Writing It’s been a while. We last discussed writing in scenes in April, which seems a very long time ago. So let’s refresh. Writing in scenes is the idea that if you plot out your novel in scenes, and you focus on writing the best possible scene, one scene … Read more
Self-Pub, Indie-Pub, or Big 5? Part 5
We’ve been talking about the paths to publishing and what each path entails so that authors can make the best possible business decision. For the last few weeks, we talked about the need for every author to market their books regardless of their publishing choice. I was asked, are there exceptions? Does everyone really market? … Read more