Every story has a central problem that the protagonist needs to deal with. Sometimes, the protagonist deals with it successfully; sometimes they fail. The problem may be something the protagonist doesn’t have but wants, something they need to do, something they need to realize, something they need
Read more →The community here has done a bang-up job of making suggestions for finding a writing group in last week’s Open Mic comments, but I’m going to add my two cents here. It’s been a while since I talked about writing groups. And the first thing I have
Read more →Once again, it is time to talk amongst yourselves while I deal with my current crop of household emergencies. (My water heater and a/c both sprang leaks in the same week…so it is a happy coincidence that this is Open Mic week! And yes, it will be
Read more →One of my best friends is in need of some writing advice. She says: “I have vague ideas, or scenes, or a few lines of dialogue about a given idea, which I try to make notes of as they come. But I don’t know how or have
Read more →Some thirty-plus years ago, shortly after I sold my second novel and was well on my way to writing my third, I met up with a college friend whom I hadn’t seen since graduation. We talked a bit about what we’d done; I mentioned that my first
Read more →A lot of writers stall at the very beginning of story construction – at the idea stage – because they have never thought about the difference between situations, incidents/events, and actual plot, much less how to move from any one of these to any of the others.
Read more →“Rolling revising” is a writing term that I think is fairly clear, but I’ll take a whack at a quick definition: Instead of writing a complete first draft from start to finish, the writer periodically goes back over already-written parts and revises them before continuing, even though
Read more →“Beginning: The point in time or space when something starts.” – Oxford languages. From that deceptively simple definition stems a lot of writerly misunderstanding. At a rough and very unscientific estimate, around 90% of the writing advice on beginnings talks about what belongs in the first few
Read more →It is another Open Mic day! Announce successes, complain about problems, recommend a book, rave about a new recipe … whatever floats your boat.
Read more →“Plot-noodling” is a term I came up with to describe a … thing … that I and some of my writer friends do when one of us is stuck; it involves the writer sitting down with one or (rarely) two other people, who ask the writer a
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