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If you’re writing a novel, but you’re not an outliner, you know the scenes must all move toward a climax and resolution. Why not map your scenes to see how they advance the goal? Writing Tip for Today: Here are some tips on scene mapping techniques: One Sentence As you finish a scene, write the […]
Whether you write fiction, memoir, nonfiction or poetry, your chosen form must have a shape that draws readers in. Writing Tip for Today: Here are some tips for sculpting your story’s shape: Climbing the Mountain If you’re a fiction or memoir writer, you’re probably aware that your story or book-length work must start with a […]
Writers are often advised to “advance” or move their stories, and to trim away anything that DOESN’T move it. But how do you actually do that?Writing Tip for Today: Here’s a little check list of things you can do to keep your novel’s plot (story) advancing: Fast Forward to the Action: Many first-time novelists defend […]
Today’s post will show you how to remedy a storyboard (and by extension, plot) with problems. Writing Tip for Today: So you’ve laid out your novel’s scenes and taken a more holistic and objective look at your story. The nice thing about storyboarding is that you can add, rearrange or cut scenes without messing around […]
Let’s talk about storyboarding. Another technique borrowed from the film industry, mapping out your story in a linear way can help identify plot redundancies, holes or scenes which are either in the wrong spot or need to be axed because they don’t move the story. Writing Tip for Today: A good storyboard contains only the […]
A very good writer has a problem. Her prose is gorgeous, but in the middle of her historical, the story stalls, staggers forward and reels backward. What can she do to remedy this problem?Writing Tip for Today: Different writers handle a sagging middle (that’s the novel not the writer) in different ways. See if any […]
I’ve been hearing from readers who don’t understand why writers measure each other by the “beauty and word craft of the prose,” when readers insist they’re only looking for a good story. Sometimes it does seem as if only other writers judge writing by how skillful or poetic the words are, fashioned into brilliant but […]
A blogger gets to do all sorts of silly stuff. So, I hereby proclaim this week: Dialogue Week. In my classes we’ll talk, walk and slosh around in dialogue writing tips. We’ll look at proper form for notating dialogue. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of no-quotation mark dialogue. If I could only tell you […]
When is it a good time to be able to state in a sentence, what an essay, scene or chapter is about? When you need to see where the overall plot of fiction is heading, or when you want to be sure your essay hasn’t digressed from its one idea. Or when you need to […]