When you’re writing your first novel, there are two main things you need to remember about Chapter One: First, the opening chapter is just as important, in terms of catching the interest of readers and/or editors, as nearly every how-to-write book or website says it is. Second,
Read more →Welcome to 2025! Lots of people do New Year’s resolutions, or come up with annual goals, or set intentions, or do some similar type of life planning at this point in the year. And apparently “write a novel” is on a lot of those lists of goals.
Read more →“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits I’ve had several requests to talk about systems for writing fiction. The trouble is that a good, workable system is particular, even when it’s
Read more →Most of the time, people analyze story structure as a chain of actions and the consequences of those actions, leading to an eventual climax. While that’s true for a lot of writing, it ignores a critical factor that is so obvious and necessary that I, like many
Read more →It’s been a long time since I wrote a short story. I think my grand lifetime total of short stories is about twenty, of which perhaps twelve were publishable. This is because I’m a natural novelist, which is also why I don’t tend to talk about writing
Read more →After doing this for as long as I have, I’ve come to the conclusion that nearly all writers have a point in their process where their story is fragile. It’s a different point for every writer, and sometimes different stories become brittle at different points, unexpectedly. A
Read more →Writing a novel is a balancing act. It starts with the Big Three (characterization, setting/world-building, plot). Each of those usually has the potential to expand exponentially in several different directions at once. At the start (and sometimes all the way through the middle), it seems as if
Read more →This is Part II of me trying to answer LM’s query, specifically the part about backward planning—that is, starting with a climax scene and working out the plot backwards from that. I had a whole other post written, then realized that I had gotten distracted talking about
Read more →Well, based on the comments in last week’s Open Mic, it looks like I’m going to be talking about structure and endings for a while. Rowan M got in first, with a request for a post about length—specifically, how you tell how long a story will be
Read more →One of the things I keep repeating over and over is that if what you are doing does not work, you should try doing something different. The problem is that this seems to go against the deepest instincts people have, because the first thing one has to
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