The dreaded feeling of writer’s block can be lurking around every corner, ready to pounce when the poor, unsuspecting writer least expects it. Or so that’s what we’re lead to believe. In reality, writer’s block is no big deal. It’s not even a real problem. What writer’s block actually is is a symptom of a […]
Third-person problems
A while back, I did a post on some of the Pitfalls of Writing in the First person. This got me thinking about some of the problems I’ve seen in third-person narratives, both in my own fiction and in other stories I’ve read for Theme of Absence or in the recent Winter Writing Contest hosted […]
What to do when you get stuck in the middle of your novel
I was making decent progress on a novel I had been working on. It’s got a solid outline mapping out a few of the major characters arcs and the overlying plot. But a little over a third of the way in, I realized something terrible. The scene I happened to be typing was…boring. It felt […]
Podcast Episode 28 – Writing Pet Peeves
In this episode of The Write Good Books Podcast, Jason and Scott look at a few of the things they see in writing that just get on their nerves, as they take turns discussing their writing pet peeves. Click the link below to stream the episode. Also available at iTunes, Soundcloud, RSS and YouTube. About […]
Where’s the conflict?
Three Types of conflict, plus(?) We can all remember learning about conflict in literature when we were in high school. The classic three types of conflict are: Man vs. Man. Man vs. Nature. Man vs. Self. You can also add Man vs. Society, but I would argue that that isn’t really any different than Man […]
When it’s okay to tell
While the long-standing mantra in fiction writing is show, don’t tell, are there ever times when telling is just as good as (or even better than) showing? I would argue that, yes, there are. And yesterday, in my post about showing, not telling, I even mentioned that there are a few times when telling is […]
3 Tricks to Help Show, Not Tell
Yesterday in a post about developing characters, I brought up the old adage Show, Don’t Tell. It got me thinking about it and as far as I can tell, I don’t think I’ve done a post on that topic. Since there are already posts about showing not telling on a million other sites, I thought […]
Develop your characters by getting to know them
Shallow characters with little development can be one of the most common causes of rejections. The person on the other side of the page (whether agent, editor, or reader) wants to see that the characters are real people, with real lives, living though (and preferably influencing) the events of the story. So how do you […]
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