Using Dirty Fighting To Escalate Tension In Your Story
Great books are filled with conflict, and great characters who learn important lessons. Writer and all-around-funny Jenny Hansen’s clever tips for Dirty Fighting Techniques can be applied to your main character’s friend, family member or a significant other…whoever he or she is in conflict. Hansen asserts, “Every entry on the Dirty Fighting List is guaranteed […]
Fiction Writing: 7 Elements of the First Page
r am I jaded? More often than I care to admit, a book’s finely crafted opening pages evoke lovestruck stars in my eyes, much as one too many nervous cocktails over tentative introductions.
Feel the Heat: Sex and Fiction. 8 Tips for Building Tension
Will your fictional characters, at some point, hit the sheets? As most of us creative types enjoy a delicious romp in the sack in real life, it shouldn’t be too difficult to apply our trusty, book-enhancing observational skills to break down, scene by scene, moment by smokin’-hot moment, the escalating tension between our first horny thought […]
Television as Teacher: 5 things we can learn from TV writers and their characters
A few weeks ago I attended the Writers Faire at UCLA. There were over 45 seminars on the craft of writing, presented by a humbling variety of the nation’s finest authors, poets and screenwriters—who just happen to teach at UCLA. (I’m salivating as I write this. I live just a few hours south–too far to […]
Crafting the Perfect Outline Identifying 5 Major Plotpoints
We can all agree on one thing: there is no one perfect recipe for cooking up a good story. The same goes for crafting an outline. Trust me, I’m elbows deep in it, and everywhere I seek advice, I’m given a different perspective. I am a big fan of Dramatica‘s approach, but at the same […]
Act 1, Scene 1, Page 1. Need your critique!
OK, my writer and reader friends, I need your help. I’m attending an exciting event in July, the Pen on Fire Speaker Series at Laguna Beach Books. On hand will be literary agents Barbara DeMarco Barrett, Jamie Weiss Chilton, Jill Marr and Sally van Haitsma who have agreed to review a single page of selected […]
Chapter Three, I know you’re in there!
I’m really struggling to flesh out Chapter Three for several reasons; to begin, I’m introducing Liam Hayden, brother of my protagonist, Treva. The structure of my narrative rotates between the perspective of three family members: Treva, Liam and father Mike Hayden. The narrative reads distinctly as the thoughts of each, and therefore, in order to […]
Improve your writing by slashing adverbs–Here’s how
Today’s educational and enlightening guest post is from the creative mind at My Literary Quest, authored by Utah resident “tsujigiri.” I feel an immediate kinship with this writer; like me, she has had a story to tell for more than a decade and is finally pursuing her dream of writing a fiction novel. Her distractions are/were […]
Chapter two… Done? Not so fast
It was with a great sense of accomplishment that I completed chapter two. I absolutely loved getting in the mind of Mike Hayden, and introducing his thoughts, some of his history, and his pain from the loss of his beloved Camille. My main character, Treva, was originally supposed to be Mike’s son, but when I […]
Fiction Writing Chapter Two: Character Name Crisis!
As I mentioned in Fiction Novel Writing: Chapter Two Begins! my second chapter’s narration springs from the mind of Mike Hayden, Treva’s father and the owner of Hayden Autos, a Southern California used-car dealership boasting mediocre success at best. A man of heart and good intentions, Mike’s hard work over the years have fallen short of […]
