When I started writing professionally, I was terrible at story openings. So much seemed to rest on how well you started a book that I overthought it. After numerous revisions, I’d end up with what would equate to something wrapped in silver duct tape and bright Christmas lights. It looked Read more
A while back, I wrote a post about using sentence function to pace your novel. Today, I want to get into story pacing on a scene-level instead of a sentence-level. There is a weird correlation between your words on the page and the reader’s perceived passage of time, and it’s Read more
In my first six months of writing these posts, I put out a list of five books every writer should read. I still stand by that list, but I’ve been building my library of writing craft books and think it’s time to share a few more gold mines I’ve discovered. Read more
Let’s examine character development in another Character Under A Microscope post. Today, I want to talk about grieving. If you’re writing your story right, the protagonist should go through many trials and eventually end up in an All is Lost moment and a Dark Night of the Soul moment. At Read more
Authors get the advice all the time to work emotions into their stories and evoke feelings from the readers. It’s sound advice, and there’s a plethora of resources out there on how to portray emotions, both internally and externally. Today though, I want to talk about what emotions we portray Read more
Previously, we’ve discussed two types of book series: episodic series and anthology series. Today, we’ll examine the continuous books series, which is centered on plot. We’ll dig into its definition, examples, and key elements. Then, we will go over how to plan a continuous book series as that most often Read more
Last week we looked into episodic book series that focus on character, and now I want to turn to a lesser known series: anthology book series. I think these ones are largely overlooked, but they can be a lot of fun to write and read. Let’s dig into what they Read more
I’ve been thinking about book series lately and how much isn’t said about them. Most people state they help increase sales because readers keep buying books, but that’s all you really hear. What about the craft behind writing series? To help bridge this gap in knowledge, I am going to Read more
It’s no secret that stories change lives. Some authors set out to change the world with their words, and others do it unintentionally. Either way, your stories will affect readers’ lives. Regardless of what you think about our world, we can all agree that there needs to be more good Read more
When you decide to write a book, there are several decisions to make, including how many point of view characters to use. Many authors prefer to tell a story from one POV, but often writers like to show different characters’ perspectives. The question is then: how many POV characters should Read more