Guest Post: 5 Things To Do In Your First 3 Paragraphs
Display your command of language. It’s worthwhile for a writer to think about poetry, and all its devices like assonance and alliteration, metaphor and allusion, internal rhythm, even meter.
Archive for the ‘Tips for Beginners’ Category
Key Conditions for Suspense:
Part 11 – Make the problem hard to solve with disadvantages
Readers want to hope and fear for a character. To feel this, they must not know what WILL happen, but do need to suspect or know what MIGHT happen and feel tension about the possibilities.
Key Conditions for Suspense:
Part 10 – Clarity, the first principle of plot
Character and problem by themselves don’t go anywhere. You still have to build reader tension to a sharp point. So how do you do that?
Key Conditions for Suspense:
Part 9 – character draws 9-10
In my last two posts, I identified a number of things that make people and, therefore, characters interesting to us. In this post, I’ll present the last two draws and introduce the next condition for reader suspense.
Ten Terrific Resources for
Writing Space-Based Hard Science Fiction
I would like to share ten resources, more or less, that I think are really terrific when it comes to getting the science right. These will be biased toward my areas of expertise, and will span books, websites, and software. Old-fashioned books first.
How to be a Writer and Have a Life: or, Livin’ the Dream
Writing is a rewarding and fun gig, but finding the time to write can be a challenge. The only commodity an author has are her words, and the only way to produce that commodity is to get some quality butt-in-chair action. Contrary to urban legend, stories don’t write themselves or grow on Novel Trees. So how do you find the time to make the magic happen?
Key Conditions for Reader Suspense:
Part 4 – Uncertainty
Surprise is one of the vital elements in story making precisely because it makes things unpredictable. It makes hope, fear, worry, and curiosity possible.
Guest Post: Advice for Teen Writers
There’s nothing like writing during adolescence. The intensity, focus, and emotional strength that such a writer brings to her/his work is, like a map frozen in time, sharply delineated and can’t be captured except as a memory of once walking in those lands.
Key Conditions for Suspense: Table of Contents
Key PROBLEM conditions for reader suspense Part 1 – It’s all about the reader Part 2 – The 3 Problem Types Part 3 – It’s gotta be difficult Part 4 – Uncertainty Key CHARACTER conditions for reader suspense Part 5 – Character troubles Part 6 – Character deservingness Part 7 – Character draws 1-4 Part […]
Guest Post: Write What You Know… or Don’t Know…
Or Want to Know… Know What I Mean?
A week or so ago, I asked a bunch of writers to share some of the best advice they’ve received and how they’ve used it. At the same time I asked them to share some of the worst, the weirdest, or the least helpful advice they’ve encountered over the years.
