November 8, 2022
It’s the beginning of the second week of NaNoWriMo and I, like many of you, am waist deep in a word pit of snarled sentences, tacky descriptions, hurried notes, and character motivations which make absolutely no sense. This week, instead of providing a beautifully sculpted piece of prose about the finer points of POV, plot, narrative style, or character development, I’m going to do my best to help you make sense of the word pit you’ve stumbled into and provide a quick few tips to help you keep your plot points straight, even when you're a quarter of the way through your draft and the plot points aren't what you thought. Are you ready?
October 17, 2022
Have you ever written a scene, only for your beta reader to be utterly confused for the first five paragraphs? Have you ever wondered whether there was an importance to the order in which you give details in your scene? Have you ever thought about how to structure your scene in order to immerse your reader as quickly as possible? If you have, then you need to learn about the five essential questions you need to answer in order to ground your scene. In this post, we will cover the essential questions, the order in which they should be answered, and the reasons behind that order.
September 9, 2022
Narrative lens and narrative distance are two of the tools a writer should always have on their tool belt.
August 31, 2022
Pacing is the rate at which your reader progresses through the story. If the pacing is so fast you have a hard time following what's going on, you start to get confused. When the pacing is slow, you ware waiting for the writer to get to the point. We don't read books just to wait around while the writer gives us pages and pages of scenery. We want action. We want change. We want plot.
August 25, 2022
Five tips to help you control narrative distance, whether you're writing in third person omniscient or third person limited.
August 18, 2022
If you’ve ever had your novel (especially genre fiction) critiqued by someone else, you’ve probably found that giant highlight which covers two-to-three paragraphs and is attached to a comment which only says “info dump”. The process of giving your readers all the information they need without “info dumping” is a hard one, but it doesn’t have to be. In this post, I’ll break down exactly what turns a paragraph of information into an “info dump”, how to avoid those things, and how to better dispense information throughout your novel.
August 13, 2022
Previously in this series, we’ve already covered how to structure a beat, and how those beats impact tension, pacing, and processing time for the reader. Since then, it’s been pointed out that my previous posts on beats only covered beats as experienced by the POV character. Well, this post is for all those poor non-POV characters I’ve accidentally excluded up until now. ..
July 29, 2022
This may come as a surprise to some of you, but you don't always have to explicitly write out some of these beats. In fact, sometimes minimizing those moments can really help the pacing of your story! It really depends on the purpose of the beat you’re exploring. If the transition is...
July 29, 2022
Stories are made up of character’s reactions to the outside world. They learn something new, they process that information, they react, and you’re off to the races! But writing that moment, that emotional transition where the character is processing new information, can be difficult. Quite often, they can be skipped over or stunted...