RADICAL PLOT REVERSALS – Another time-honored way of building suspense and creating tension is to create radical reversals for your characters. Reversals that jar the reader, create confusion, uncertainty, and doubt. SELF-INFLICTED REVERSALS – A reversal could be self-inflicted. For example, a recovering alcoholic with decades of sobriety could fall off the wagon. An ex-gang…
WITHHOLDING- Withholding is one of the simplest and most effective ways to create tension and build suspense. Remember Christmas as a child? Did you ever pick up a gift-wrapped box with your name on it days before Christmas and shake it in an effort to determine its contents? Though you were outwardly chafed, there was…
How do I write a synopsis for my book? At its most fundamental level, a synopsis answers the question: What is this book about? A synopsis should cover (in abbreviated form) all the major points of your book in sequential order from beginning to end. In a work of fiction, you’ll want to cover all…
If you’re a writer, YOU do. Every story needs a conflict at the center of it. If plot is the fundamental building block of a story, then conflict is the fundamental building block of plot. No conflict, no plot. No plot, no story. Because if everyone in your story already has everything they need, if…
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE BLURB WRITING A BLURB IS NOT EASY: Anyone who thinks writing a blurb is easy, has probably never written a good blurb. The blurb I speak of here is the kind that’s found on the back of a novel – a short paragraph briefly encapsulating a book’s essence, it’s heart…
For the purposes of this blog, a blurb is the brief description of a book’s contents found on the book’s back cover, written with the intent of tantalizing the reader and selling the book. THE IMPORTANCE OF A GOOD BLURB: Just as a prospective editor or agent reads the first page of your novel and…
The most important part of any story is the characters. Indeed, the characters ARE the story. If you don’t have believable characters, you don’t have a story – no matter how good the rest of the writing may be. When creating fun and realistic characters, the thing you want most is for your characters to…
The First Fifty – Crucial – Pages of Your Book Using urgency for your characters and putting them in peril to keep your readers engaged and turning the page of your book. The first fifty pages of your book are crucial for setting the hook in your readers. Something has to happen. Something exciting, or…
Benefits and Drawbacks of Each POV in Your MS How to use different points of view in your novel manuscript for fiction. As a beginning writer who chose to write my first book in first-person narrative, I discovered the drawbacks of such an approach the hard way. Halfway through the book, I started all over…
Are You Overwhelming Your Readers? World-building in science fiction novels and stories – are you giving readers too much information at a time? Have you ever run across a prologue like this: (usually in sci-fi books) Captain Briggs took the helm and began shouting orders. “Ensign, optimize the traspositional filtration valves to ignite the gravitational…
Should I use sentence fragments in my book manuscript? Is this bad writing or style? Sentence fragments. Who cares? You? Me? Anyone? Depends. Writing nonfiction? Probably wouldn’t. Work, that is. Writing fiction? Could be. Depends. On what? Style. With some authors? Might work. Others? Not so much. A hundred years ago? Wouldn’t have been acceptable….
How Many Manuscript Drafts Should You Go Through? How many times should you revise and rewrite your book? What should I do about editing my manuscript? When working on a book of any kind, if you haven’t gone through a minimum of three drafts, you probably don’t have a finished product. The first draft should…