Salt Lake Comic Con FanX Schedule
I’ll be at Salt Lake Comic Con FanX in a few days. If you are going to be there, you should stop by my booth or panels. Here is my panel schedule: Thursday, March 24th 4-5 p.m. The Newt Harry Potter 6-7 p.m. Writing Fantasy: An Inside Look at the Art & Craft of Creating […]
Building a Better Battering Ram
Last night, a new writer who is preparing his first novel asked, “When do I begin approaching agents?” I get that question at least once a week, and my answer is always the same: “When your novel is done. And by that I mean, well done!” I think that it is human nature to be […]
How One Indie Author Reached Professional Sales with His First Book
“I’d heard enough tales of the publishing industry to decide that I didn’t want to put in the effort of writing a book only to have it spend a decade or two being rejected. . . . Less than two months after being published, Torchship had earned enough to qualify for membership in my genre’s […]
Bringing Your Scene to Life through Action
Have you ever read a story that starts with a character sitting in a still forest, just thinking? They’re almost always dull. I’ve read, and rejected, thousands of them for publication. Why? Because the whole darned story is just sitting there, doing nothing, too. So we’re trained as writers to avoid such scenes, to start […]
7 Ways to Be More Creative
I’m doing something a little different today for my writing tip. This article, 7 Ways to Be More Creative, caught my attention this week, and I thought it was a pretty good read. So, for today’s tip, I’m going to send you to it to read: 7 Ways to Be More Creative. Hopefully it will […]
How Bad is Your Antihero?
Lately I’ve had several people ask for tips on how to write antiheroes. So my first question is, “How ‘bad’ is your antihero?” An antihero is a character without traditional heroic qualities, but they may have heroic qualities in their own right. He or she is the kind of person who knows how to kick […]
What’s in Your Secret Sauce?
In my book Million Dollar Outlines I discuss some of the markers that can help me discover if a book is a potential hit. I look at whether it was written to a wide audience or a narrow one, whether it transports the reader to another world, and how well it arouses powerful, desirable emotions […]
Writing Wretched Dialog Tags
If you really want to write wretched dialog, you should consider working on your dialog tags. Here are a few options that you might not have considered. I love a story that starts out with tags like this: Elena: “Did you buy the soup?” Jacob: “What soup?” Elena: “The split pea soup that I begged […]
How to Write Wretched Dialog
Recently I read a couple of stories where it felt as if the author was struggling to come up with bad dialog. So I thought I should give a few tips on how to do it properly. The easiest way to write wretched dialog is to use dialog for the wrong things. In other words, […]
Stalking the Wild Reader + Get 5 Free Books
A couple of years ago, I read an article about hounds hunting for rabbits. Researchers had found that when a hound is hunting for a rabbit, each time that the hound caught a rabbit’s scent, the dog’s brain released dopamine as a reward, to keep him hunting. It wasn’t until the hound actually caught a […]