Chapter Titles
There are a couple of good reasons to title your chapters. First of all, when you are writing a novel, you often want to “hook” your reader into reading the next chapter. A good chapter title can do that. You don’t have to work hard at it. Something as simple as “A Killer Unmasked” promises […]
What Does Your Reader Really Want?
I’m in the midst of judging a large short story writing contest, going through the first pass. Now, this is an anonymous contest, one where the judges shouldn’t know things like your name, hometown, sex, or age. I’m proud of the fact that the contest can judge authors on merit alone. And the rules on […]
Payoff
I’ve said before that every story should have an emotional payoff. Yet far too often, I read stories where the payoff is weaker than it should be, or it isn’t there at all. If you’re writing genre literature—romance, horror, wonder, comedy, thrillers, and so on—then your readers are paying you to arouse an emotional state, […]
Sagging Middles, Part 2
Recently, I discussed how to deal with a sagging middle in a novel. Here are a couple more tips that will help you strengthen that middle. Vary Your Story Sometimes a novel feels dull in the middle because your conflicts are not varied enough. In other words, as the reader is going along, he feels […]
Facing Burnout
Many authors don’t believe that there is such a thing as “Writer’s Block.” They will gleefully point out that plumbers don’t have plumber’s block, and doctors don’t have doctor’s block. But the truth is that they do have it, but simply call it by other names. They might call it a “midlife crisis,” “stress,” or […]
Silence isn’t Golden
In the past few weeks, the writing community across the nation has been rocked by accusations of sexual harassment and abuse. Most of the allegations that I’ve heard don’t rise to the level of criminal behavior: After all, very few men are as vile as Harvey Weinstein. But many of those accused of improper conduct […]
Taking Control
Taking Control I know a lot of writers who feel that they don’t have control of their writing lives. After all, when you send a novel into an editor or agent, you can’t control whether it will be accepted—even if it later becomes an all-time bestseller. Nor can you control the whims of a reviewer […]
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
I’m helping a friend work on a story right now, and it’s a rather strange one. It’s the story of a handsome, idealistic young man, just out of college, who starts a company. His goal is to bring down corrupt governments and help the poor and homeless around the world, so even though he has […]
Sagging Middles
There comes a time when you’ve turned the corner on your story opening, and you feel like you’ve got it down right . . . and then . . . you go into your middle. Typically, by the time that you’re into the middle, you’ve gotten a lot of your character development down, your settings […]
How to Decide What Goes in Your Scene
Very often I see new writers who can write exciting prose on a line-by-line basis, but when I start reading their stories, I soon discover that the story itself is weak, and that the author just has too much going on in the scene. The author’s descriptions may wander, so that the story loses tension, […]
