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…
When you write a scene in your story, it can be hard to balance the description with the action. The readers need to be able to picture the setting and characters, but too much description can make the story feel like it isn’t moving forward. There is a three step Read more…
Every writer wants to have engaging characters that hook the readers. In this post, I’m going to talk about three elements that can create a character that readers want to get behind. These are proactivity, competence, and sympathy. All three elements should be treated like sliders instead of an on/off Read more…
When I first started submerging myself in writing lingo, I listened to podcasts by authors. I heard the word denouement several times and recognized it as French, but I had no clue what it meant. While the word itself isn’t mandatory to know as a writer, what it represents for Read more…
We’ve talked about the Try/Fail cycle and how it needs to be repeated at least three times in a novel, and now we’re going to focus on one moment in the last cycle. Arguably, the most important scene in your book. This moment has been called many things: the Reversal, Read more…
This week we’re getting to the heart of the major conflict in any plot. James Scott Bell emphasizes that every story is about a character confronting death, but it’s not as straight forward as it sounds. There are three types of death: physical, professional, and psychological. All stories need conflict, Read more…
This week is about application of what we are learning. I’m going to take the eight character types we discussed the last few weeks and apply it to one book: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I picked this story to show that, though these roles seem to be geared Read more…