I’ve edited a lot of fiction. Read a lot of it, too. I can nearly always spot the newer writers, because their control of point-of-view slips frequently. They drop into the dreaded telling, instead of showing, often without realizing it. And their narrative voice sometimes doesn’t match the character’s voice. There’s usually more evidence: Setting […]
An Instant, Easy Fix To Make Your Fiction More Unputdownable Read More »
What Pissed You Off Today? Use Your Life to Build Amazing Stories A quick technique for story ideas that write themselves So what made you swear under your breath today? What had you gritting your teeth? Or did something amazing happen? How did you feel about that, right in the moment? Did a quiet moment
What Pissed You Off Today? Use Your Life to Build Amazing Stories Read More »
Most story ideas, even the coolest of them, are just ideas. Here’s an idea I grabbed off a random plot generator I found online: An action thriller set in New York in the 1980s about a dying cop with a secret, trying to do a heist. Now there’s some intriguing ideas in this one. More
Two Questions That Transform Your Meh Fiction Idea To One Readers Rush To Buy Read More »
One Key To Keeping Your Genre Fiction Plots Tight and Your Reader Flipping Pages Hack through Every Plotting Structure, including The Hero’s Journey You can go crazy trying to find and use the ideal plotting structure. Three act structure. Four act structure. Save the Cat. Story Physics. Story Grid. Even the venerable Hero’s Journey. Every guru says
One Key To Keeping Your Genre Fiction Plots Tight and Your Reader Flipping Pages Read More »
I wince every time I see this structure in fiction. Do you use it? The structure goes like this: Walking to the window, he watched the seagulls soar over a silvered sea. An innocuous sentence? Actually, it’s a howling clunker of sentence, and I’ll explain why in a minute. For now, I want to draw
5 Reasons Why Ditching This Sentence Structure Will Massively Improve Your Fiction Read More »
