This week I’m going to keep my post short yet hopefully powerful. I want to discuss what keeps readers interested in a story. Is it the villain? The setting? The romance? When we boil everything down to the very basics, what keeps people reading? It’s a lot simpler than most Read more
Every story should have some tension in each scene, though the level of tension will vary. Major turning points in the plot, like the midpoint or climax, will be higher while the connecting scenes might just have a low level of tension. But beyond just putting your characters in danger, Read more
As writers, we hear the phrase “Show, don’t tell” quite a bit. Like most things, there is more than one layer to this advice. A while back, I gave some advice on deep point of view, and in that post I did a section called Don’t Tell where I covered Read more
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
A while back I wrote a post on the two functions of scenes: action and reaction. Since writing that post, I found the origin on this concept called Scene-Sequel. It was developed by Dwight V. Swain in his book Techniques of the Selling Writer. Today I want to elaborate on Read more
In the past, I’ve gone over the two functions of scenes and the three secrets of scenes, but today I want to talk about a scene’s cycle. A scene is the basic unit of story. By putting together multiple scenes, you create your book. However, you also have to make Read more
Scenes are units of story that, when stacked together, make up a whole story. A scene happens in one time and space from one POV and must have a change arc. In this post, we are going to explore three not widely known facts about scenes that will help you 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