Your Book is Not Your Legacy
When the aspiring authors I work with are faced with a bout of writer’s block, I find it’s often the result of an intense stress they’re experiencing related to writing. Where does this stress come from? NOT from contractually obligated deadlines – most of the writers I work with are first-time authors who have not yet signed a…
FAQs for Aspiring Authors
Writing a novel requires authors to make thousands of decisions on a daily basis. Every time a writer sits down to draft, they have to make choices about what’s going to happen, the words they’re going to use, and a dozen other factors that will impact how the story is told. Unfortunately, many aspiring authors never get around to making…
4 Proven Methods for Tracking Your Writing Progress
How’s your work-in-progress coming along? Is your current approach to writing getting you the best results possible? Are you writing quicker these days, or are you slowing down? When will the book be done? Let’s face it . . . Answering these questions will be next to impossible if you aren’t tracking progress in some…
If You Have a Day Job, You’re Not a Real Writer
I’d like to think you weren’t fooled for a moment by this article’s utterly ridiculous headline. Unfortunately, through my work as a writing coach, I’ve learned many aspiring authors actually believe they’ll never be “real” writers until they can quit their day jobs. This is a complete falsehood. Your day job has nothing to do…
3 Brilliant Methods for Writing Extraordinary Scenes
It’s vitally important that authors know how to craft great scenes because scenes are the basic building block of narrative fiction. As I discussed in my article, The Difference between Scenes, Sequences, and Chapters, a scene is a continuous piece of action within a linear timeframe and (generally) contained to a single location. A leap…
Yes, you DO have to suffer for your art
A friend of mine recently passed away. Losing her was extremely painful. So I wrote about it. Because I’m a writer and that’s the process: life kicks you in the gut and then you write. We’ll come back to that concept in a moment, but first let’s talk about Jack Kerouac’s seminal book On the Road. It…
Theme and Controlling Idea are NOT the Same Thing
Many authors, literary critics, and High School English teachers conflate a book’s “theme” and “controlling idea” into the same concept, implying both terms mean the message of the book. I prefer to differentiate the two concepts. I see theme as something that can emerge (often unconsciously) in the drafting of a manuscript, whereas a controlling idea is…
How to Create Charismatic Characters — Part 5: Supporting and Minor Characters
In the first four parts of this series, we’ve explored character creation largely in the context of main characters, i.e. protagonists and antagonists. But our novels are, of course, filled with many other types characters. In this article, the final article in our series, we’ll look at the role supporting characters and minor characters play…
How to Create Charismatic Characters — Part 4: Twilight/Hunger Games Case Study
In part 3 of this series, we examined the character depth spectrum, which has well-rounded characters on one end and flat characters on the other. For an interesting example of how flat and well-rounded characters can both be used effectively, in this article we are going to look at two hugely popular young adult action franchises: Twilight and The…
How to Create Charismatic Characters — Part 3: The Character Depth Spectrum
In part 1 of this series on creating characters, we discussed assigning physical attributes to characters. In part 2, we discussed the importance of identifying our character’s objects of desire. In this this article, we’re going to look at what I call “the character depth spectrum.” All characters exist on a spectrum of depth or complexity.…
