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Asking the 5 Whys for More Convincing Story Characters
A scenario: Your intimate love of 11 years arrives home one day and says, out of the blue, that he’s quit his job and enrolled […]
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The Myth of the Thick-Skinned Novelist
Some years ago, when I was a fledgling storyteller still puzzling through the basics of what makes a story work (or not), I frequented a […]
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Playing with Narrative Mode
There’s one more post I wanted to do in this series on narrative mode, to write and rewrite a short snippet in a number of […]
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Reading Your Characters’ Minds: Picking the Right Voice
This is the third part in my series on narrative mode. I wrote about narrative voice briefly some months ago, in the context of narrative […]
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Your Story’s Point of View: Picking the Right Person
Picking the right person… No, this is not about dating. This is about narrative person, which I wrote about briefly in the context of narrative […]
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Intense Conflict vs. Gentle Conflict
Conflict is the engine that drives a story forward. And not just any conflict, but relevant, meaningful conflict that matters to the protagonist and to […]
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When Is Your Narrator?: Picking the Right Tense
What to do with tense? I wrote about this briefly a few months ago, in the context of narrative mode, and I mentioned a few […]
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Starting a Novel without a Title (but with a Cover)
I usually start a novel with at least a working title. Not this time. However, I am starting with a working cover design. This is […]
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Agile Storytelling
I generally write a story using a process similar to Randy Ingermanson’s “Snowflake†method, but I don’t think of my process as resembling anything like […]
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11+ Ways to Say “He Smiled”
One of the banes of writing fiction is trying to find interesting ways to say ordinary things. And smiling is one of those. Everyone smiles. […]
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