I discovered the Enneagram for developing characters a number of years ago. I came to it in a bit of a roundabout way. Basically, I discovered a site for character development with some cute names for nine types of characters and some great information on these types....
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...
There are days I am overwhelmed with the number of people who want me to give them money, and I don't mean regular life bills. I mean "experts" who are going to tell me how to sell more books. Who are going to make me a Kindle millionaire or get me 300,000 followers...
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...
Author newsletters... a pain, right? You have to build the list, you have to house the list, you have to design newsletters, come up with content and then send your author newsletter. So much work... and so much techy type crap. Ugh. No, double ugh. But, yes, you...
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...
