Tweet I started the week with fond remembrances of cliff-diving without the water. And I started that post with a link back to other stories from my childhood, exploring the far forested acres of my parents’ farm. I blamed the recent nostalgia on my childhood buddy Josh, for mentioning some of those stories on Facebook, […]
Tweet Yesterday’s post on the narrative difference between conflict and adversity ended with some specific advice: Avoid adversity by putting malicious cause behind your protagonist’s setbacks. The best way to do that is to make your antagonist responsible, but sometimes it can be a challenge to follow through on that. The trick is to manage […]
Tweet Way back when, I tried to start a series around here on some of the specialized storytelling terminology I’ve been learning in my Master of Professional Writing course. I got into Plates and Hooks and Scene Questions and Story Questions, and that diverted me off into a separate series on Story Questions. I’m not […]
Tweet It was a couple weeks ago when I talked about the importance of designing good story questions. Since then I’ve talked about the diverse properties of bones, and some rules for using story questions to build a structurally sound novel. Leaving out the cute story about my kid, most of the discussion has been […]
Tweet I’ve spent a couple weeks trying desperately to finish up Taming Fire for publication this month. But last time we talked, it was about the questions that keep people reading your stories, and the big story question that drives your story forward. I said offhand that well-designed story questions and scene questions make it […]
Tweet This week we’re talking about industry terms, and specifically focusing on the questions that keep people reading. Yesterday I talked about the gimmicks–hooks and plates–but today I want to talk about your load-bearing questions. These are the questions that form the foundation of your story. They’re the questions that drive your protagonist through some […]
Tweet At long last, I’m going to fulfill a promise made weeks ago. I’m going to teach you some storytelling terminology. As I admitted to Joshua Unruh yesterday, I tend to work off a couple different writing glossaries that use some overlapping but non-identical terms. That means when I say “plot point” in one context […]
Tweet I’ve told the story before about the time I graduated from college, realized I needed to get a job (yes, in that order), freaked out, and then fell into a high-paying technical-writing position that was created just for me. My interview went, “Would you prefer to work in this cubicle, or that one?” And […]
Tweet This week I’m talking about a series of lectures my Professional Writing professor taught on getting started in traditional publishing. In yesterday’s article I talked about the hard work and the patience that has to go into making a career out of writing (even after you’ve put in the hard work and patience to […]
Tweet One of the more interesting parts of my professor’s lectures on the business of writing this week was what she called “career building.” She started with a hypothetical first book, and worked it through a new writer’s burgeoning career. That’s the sort of long-term financial projection Konrath likes to work through from time to […]
