Nanowrimo started yesterday. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last seventeen years, Nanowrimo is short for National Novel Writing Month, a writer’s challenge that started in 1999 with the idea of writing a 50,000 word novel between November 1 and 11:59 on November
Read more →A quick aside: Sorcery and Cecelia in ebook form is on sale today, Wednesday October 26, for $1.99 through the International BookBub newsletter. So if you were waiting to pick up a copy, now’s your chance. Back to our regularly scheduled post. Regardless of whether an author
Read more →Different writers get different things “for free” – that is, different techniques and skills come naturally to different writers. I learned this early on, but it took years before I realized that I needed to apply that knowledge to more than my own first draft, and years
Read more →If subplots are “a secondary sequence of action,” what’s the point of having them? Isn’t the primary sequence of action enough? There are quite a lot of points, it turns out, depending on the sort of story one is writing and where one wants it to go.
Read more →The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines a subplot as “a secondary sequence of actions in a dramatic or narrative work,” which is true enough, but not always much help when you’re having difficulty figuring out which parts of your manuscript are subplots and which aren’t.
Read more →Having lots of viewpoint characters is usually one major reason for a proliferation of subplots. Each viewpoint character is the protagonist of his/her own story, and that story inevitably has its own subplots. So if you normally find that your stories have two subplots, and your novel
Read more →Kin asked: Any thoughts on how to manage a proliferation of sub-plots and POV’s? Lots. Which is why I’m making this a post rather than a quick answer to a comment. The first thing you need to look at is why you have all those viewpoint characters
Read more →Storyboarding is a structure analysis technique that comes out of the film industry, where it’s been used since the very early days to give writers, directors, and producers a sort of visual outline of a film. A true storyboard is a series of drawings, each of which
Read more →Last week, I got a series of questions from a student who was working on a worldbuilding project. Several of them caught my attention, most notably the one that asked when it is “appropriate” to use magic that has no strict set of rules in a story,
Read more →One of the current fundamental tenets for writing fiction is that in order to be a “good book,” the central character in the story has to change as a result of the events in it. If one attempts to question this “requirement,” one is informed that if
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