Maybe your protagonist needs someone to bounce around ideas with. Or maybe your hero/ine needs guidance. Or maybe your protagonist needs someone to set them straight on those things that your hero/ine doesn’t want to deal with. You may need a mentor character in your novel.
I\’ve been chatting with some authors about the use of pen names. This week it\’s Steven B. Moores, author of Dead on Cuban Time, Cherub\’s Play, and Love\’s Last Stand. Tell us about you as human, and you as author. In my day job I’m an attorney with the US Environmental Protection Agency, helping keep … Read more
We’ve talked about the inciting incident, and the climax in our plotting process. Now it’s time to consider the ending. Endings can be tricky. Endings should be gratifying and fulfilling for your reader. After all, the reader has invested their time into reading your ENTIRE book and unhappy readers are not good for writers. Make … Read more
It\’s summer which is a reminder for me to evaluate my writing progress. While I don\’t make New Year\’s Resolutions at the beginning of the year, I do make a list of goals. I never achieve them perfectly, but I do move closer to achieving them over time, and I do the work step-by-step to … Read more
You know how it is. You are some place, maybe waiting in a long line, or at the car repair shop. You strike up a conversation with someone. You talk about the wait time, or the weather, or the food, or some safe topic. Inevitably, the conversation will get around to the business of what … Read more
Writing is a solitary activity. It just isn’t possible to have someone else do your writing for you. Sure, you can hire a ghost writer, but then the ghost writer is the actual writer, not you. If YOU are the writer, then you must do that activity all by your lonesome. There is no other … Read more
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
After my speech at Pubcon17 last weekend on the topic of the paths to publishing, several attendees requested that I blog the information so they could have it available as a reference. Consequently, I am going to detour off our previous topic of scene writing for the next few weeks to accommodate this request. What … Read more