Articles

One of the hardest things to see in your own manuscript is where it is its own worst enemy—where it encourages your reader to stop reading.  Whether it’s nonfiction or fiction, a book’s success hangs on pulling the reader from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, page to page.  Such…

Writing Workshop with guest speaker Erik "Kata" Schuyler of Wambtac Communications, LLC.

SCREAM! ACCUSE! BEMOAN! LAMENT! RAGE! SOB! REVEAL! HOWL! REGRET! In terms of catharsis, nothing beats a first draft.  That’s where you get to yell at everybody, cry your eyes out, sling accusations willy-nilly, and bring up every stored-away-for-the-right-moment injury that happened (or maybe actually didn’t) throughout your lifetime.  Or, if…

In the last post, we talked about how plot and character must be interwoven to produce a satisfying story. In this post, we’ll take a deeper look at every character’s starting point: perspective.  A person’s (or character’s) perspective is colored by their background: their upbringing, their parents’ attitudes and biases,…

Most people think a story’s “plot” is a just-the-facts version of what happens: boy and girl (or boy and boy, girl and girl, snail and fossil—whatever) meet cute; boy and girl rush to lust; boy/girl/both cheats; boy and girl break up; cheater somehow redeems themselves; boy and girl reunite; a…