Character development can be hard work. You want to create characters who ring true, but who are also interesting and unique. You also want them to be consistent. You don't want them hopping from one feel to another and get comments from readers that your characters...
How to Write a Book or "How do I write a book?" is the most basic and yet the most complicated question I get from other writers. For fun, I plugged this question into Google and got some really bad advice. Like starting with the names of each chapter. Maybe that...
When plotting your book the scene you probably know immediately is the Inciting Incident. It's the event that kicks off all of the action in your book. The Inciting Incident is what pushes your character to make some choice or embark on some journey that is the main...
If you are familiar with most of the common plot structures for fiction, both for novelists and screenwriters, you have heard the term Ordinary World. Even if you aren't familiar with these plotting structures, the term kind of gives it away. The Ordinary World is the...
So far in our discussion of how to write a scene, we've talked about what scene is, both as many think of it and as Dwight Swain defines it in Techniques of the Selling Writer. We've also gone over the importance of sequel and showing your characters motivation. Today...
Transition words and phrases. As writers, we spend a lot of time talking about plot, character, setting, and description. We learn how to put all of those together into scenes and how to show character motivation with sequel. But then when it comes time to stitch it...
One of the writing tips you've most likely heard is probably to avoid clichés. This writing tip is so widely shared that it has almost become a cliché itself. So you know that clichés in creative writing should be avoided like the plague. But so often a cliché is the...
I'm in the middle of book revisions right now for the third book in my Dusty Deals Mystery series. I'm not actually done with the book yet, but I took a break from writing this novel to go back and revise a few things that were bugging me. I do this at times if...
I’m a big believer in a conversational approach to writing a synopsis which frequently is also part of my plotting. This Guide to World Building works with this same idea. Rather than going all left brain and filling out a list, I just sit back and let the ideas flow....
