August 25, 2022
Five tips to help you control narrative distance, whether you're writing in third person omniscient or third person limited.
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.
September 9, 2022
Narrative lens and narrative distance are two of the tools a writer should always have on their tool belt.
September 19, 2022
The hook - the first line of your novel - is the single most important sentence in your story. Here are 2 don'ts and 1 do which will help you write a killer opening sentence.
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.
October 22, 2022
I used to struggle with my endings a lot. Part of that was because I didn’t have a really good idea of what I wanted to write, and the other part was because I had absolutely no grounding in story structure. Here’s the process I now use to figure out a good ending to my story. ...
October 26, 2022
Dark Night of the Soul. One of the most emotionally devastating, yet brilliantly fulfilling moments in any story. Done correctly, this moment will move your readers to tears, then scoop them back up and fling them to untold emotional heights...
November 2, 2022
I have my major story plots pretty much set out, however I am having trouble with the opening scene. How do I decide which idea to use?
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?