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 […]
Write What You Know. (But what do you know?)
If there’s one saying that is repeated to new writers even more than Show, Don’t Tell, it’s got to be “Write what you know.” I had a college poetry professor that like the phrase so much he made us recite it every day as class begun. What’s kind of funny is that after all these […]
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 […]
3 Things I Need to Fix in My Own Writing
You’re probably thinking, “Only three? Who are you kidding?” Rest assured, there are probably hundreds of things I need to fix. But in this post, I’d like to discuss the three most pressing, at least as I see them. Poor Descriptions I think I’m pretty good at writing action and dialogue. The problem is that […]
My Weakest Link: Describing Stuff
I like to think that when it comes to writing, my strongest points are on action and dialog. I’m okay with pace and plotting. And fifty-fifty with settings and characters (that one kind of depends on the genre, I suppose.) But putting the strengths aside, I also know exactly where I’m at my weakest: I […]