Story structure comes in many variations with just as many ways to classify it. One of the leading voices on story structure is Orson Scott Card and his MICE Quotient. He divides all stories into four categories based on what element the author values the most when writing the story. Read more…
When you get deep into the research of writing novels, there is cross over with writing screenplays for movies. One phrase I recently came across in my research is the Four-Quadrant Movie Model. Though not all screenplay concepts can be used for novels, I think this one is something we Read more…
I already touched on the topic of internal conflict, and this week I want to dive into it a little more. Character wound is a concept that continues to surface in my writing research. A wound refers to an impactful negative event that happened in the character’s past and created Read more…
A hook is something that evokes intrigue in the readers. It can be a catchy title, gorgeous cover art, intriguing book summary, glowing book review, or compelling premise. Most often for writers, it’s little tidbits we put in the book to make the reader turn the page. Why Hooks Work Read more…
We already covered portraying a character’s emotions, and now I want to address the emotions we try to arouse in our readers. When an author writes something to get an emotional response from the reader, we call it an emotional beat. These are very useful in connecting with the readers Read more…
In this post, when I say scene, I’m not referring to a setting but to part of a sequence of events. A scene in a book is marked by breaks. These can be a chapter break or just a line break. These symbolize a jump in the story to a Read more…
I’ve heard it said several times by professionals that the final draft of your book should be at least 10% shorter than your first draft. This happens because you cut out the excess—both in scenes and in words. It may seem daunting, but, in my experience, it’s more tedious than Read more…
As writers, we use foils all the time in our writing without realizing it. A foil is when you put opposites close together in order to make one stand out more. I’ve heard that the term comes from jewelers who placed a piece of foil under a gem to make Read more…
If you’ve heard it before, you’re going to keep hearing it. Conflict makes a good story. But it can’t just be a simple problem. It should start as something wrong and snowball into a catastrophe by the climax of the story. You do this by broadening and deepening the conflict Read more…
There’s a theory that storytellers hypnotize their readers by the power of suggestion. I’ve never studied hypnosis, but I see the similarities and have put it on my list of topics to research further. In this post, we are going over the five levels of brain waves and one way Read more…