Following up a Writer’s Summit
Following up a Writer’s Summit, a few days on from Escape the Plot Forest , I’m still digesting all that material and need to go over some of it again!
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Writing
How long is a paragraph?
A dense wall of text with little or no white space sends readers running; so how long is a paragraph?. Online and digital devices mean short paragraphs are the new standard.
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Story in Seventeen Chapters
Writers recommend many different story structures including the classic story in seventeen chapters. It’s built around the Fichtean curve and employs three to four moments of crisis. Each escalates and raises the stakes.
It makes for fast-paced stories and works well across genres. …
The Magic in Magical Realism
Proving how certain genres defy definition, here’s my fourth attempt to define the magic in magical realism.
I struggled so much with this, I’m leaning into the Masterclass definition: …
Using Transition words
Using transition words in your text can help you enhance the readability. Used well, these words help your text flow. They show the relationship between phrases, sentences and paragraphs. They demonstrate how thoughts and ideas are connected. …
Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing
From a master of crime fiction, Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing carry a lot of weight.
Leonard began his career writing Westerns before turning to genre crime fiction. Popular and prolific, his bestsellers include Glitz, Get Shorty, Maximum Bob, and Rum Punch. More importantly, Leonard has standing with the literary crowd. …
Final-Third Frenzy
The notion of final-third frenzy comes from a Reedsy webinar The Top Suspense Novel Pitfalls. Taking the broad category of suspense novels as more complex forms of fiction, there’s a lot can go wrong in engineering the plot and structure. …
Seven Deadly Fears of Writing
What’s been stopping you from producing that magnum opus? From the opening of Jurgen Wolff’s 2007 Your Writing Coach, what follows is our take on his Seven Deadly Fears of Writing; those fears that stop would-be, and even some professional writers getting on with the job of writing.
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Outlining a book
Outlining a book? Why not? Sixty, seventy, eighty thousand words or more. That’s your typical novel. Somehow you have to get to there from a blank page. Unless you’re an accomplished free-writer, that’s where an outline can help.
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Planning a Series
I set out to write one book and found myself planning a series. I’m defining a series as a number of stories linked by shared characters or settings. Simple, enough? Wrong.
There are different types of series. Oh, goody. Planning a series just got more difficult. …