Tweet This week we’re talking about narrative scenes — the storytelling elements that clarify your characters and progress your plot. How Scenes Work As I said yesterday, every scene in your story must move your story forward. That can consistent of character-building, occasionally, and really only in the first act, but in most genres you […]
Tweet This month we’re reviewing all the parts and processes that go into developing a story. Our goal is to put together a complete prewriting package to do some of the heavy lifting for you when it comes time to write a novel in November. So far, if you’ve been following along, you have Characters, […]
Tweet I’m not at all sure it’s a good idea to tell this story. No one’s ever called me “discerning,” though. So I’m going to tell it anyway. I’ve spent most of my life trying (successfully, for the most part) to win the love of the woman who most loves Gods Tomorrow. That’s a writer’s […]
Tweet Okay, for a week now I’ve been talking about the Conflict Resolution Cycle worksheet. It’s a questionnaire/assignment I cooked up a couple years back to force a writer through the questions necessary to convert a story idea into an actual narrative. Most of the questions explain themselves, so instead of opening with a big […]
Tweet Earlier this week I told a story. It was one I had to tell, under the circumstances. On the day I launched Gods Tomorrow to the public, you’d better bet I was going to talk about my novel. It works well as an illustration for the writing principles I want to talk about this […]
Tweet Okay, October is already washing out from under us like sand in the surf, right? Next thing we know, we’re going to be caught in an undercurrent and sweeping toward Christmas without a lifeguard in sight. (I may have gotten lost in my metaphor there.) That’s okay. I don’t know how closely you looked […]
Tweet On Tuesday I told the story of the time I learned why I was such an awful baseball player: I only learned after it was over that I was severely nearsighted. I suspect my lone experience with team sports would have gone a lot differently if I’d played the season in glasses. I’ll never […]
Tweet I mentioned before that I grew up with no great love for team sports. To some extent that was inevitable, as I spent my early years living on a little country farm — my closest playmates a mile and a half down a dirt road, and neither of them my age. I learned to […]
Tweet Yesterday I talked about the benefits of prewriting when it comes to your NaNoWriMo novel, and I listed some of the assignments I like to go through (and give out). In the coming month I’ll go into pretty close detail on the most important ones — the ones I haven’t already covered, anyway. The […]
Tweet This month I’ve been talking about NaNoWriMo, and how I bullied my dad and sister into writing their first novels, and my own glorious experience writing Gods Tomorrow a couple years back. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of writing a novel. Well…actually, that’s not true. There’s definitely another thrill that matches it: Holding […]
