How to Write and Publish Children's Books
A writer makes many decisions when it comes to approaching a manuscript. We have to decide on our characters, our plot, our setting, our descriptions … all that content jazz. We also have to decide several storytelling issues. Is this story going to be told in past tense or present tense? Will it be told …
Continue reading “Changing a Manuscript’s Narrative POV or Tense”
Character arc — or how your character changes throughout the course of your story — is critical to developing compelling fiction. Believe it or not, I have read manuscripts where the writer seemed to ignore character arc completely and came up with an almost entirely static character. Your Character Arc Should Be a Journey This …
Every once in a while, I stumble upon dead scene writing. One where, technically, nothing happens. It usually involves either an author who is writing a scene brimming with information or really loves writing descriptions or witty banter. Writing A Scene: Avoid Dead Scenes In two manuscripts I’ve read recently, I’ve encountered dead scene writing. These …
I was reading a manuscript the other week that included a lot of expository dialogue. In this instance, the characters relied on each other’s names too much when they were speaking to each other. This kind of telling in dialogue is, believe it or not, a common problem, as is this other, slightly related one: characters …
If you’re wondering how to edit your own writing with an eye towards trimming the fat, this post is for you. There’s almost nothing harder than “killing your babies” and axing chunks of your writing. Everybody loves their writing. It’s always hard to lose a word here, a line there, sometimes an entire paragraph. But …
There’s tons of fantasy worldbuilding going on nowadays, with all the manuscripts out there whose main characters have magic powers. This can be fun and interesting, but the more I read of them, the more a strange habit rears its little head. Writing magic systems is difficult work, since magic is, by its very nature, …
Continue reading “Fantasy Worldbuilding: A Magic of Convenience”
A friend of mine, a published adult writer whose characters have ranged from sixteen to twenty-five years old, mentioned an interesting opinion the other day. “I was thirty four when I wrote my twenty-five year-old character,” she said. “I wanted to write her then because, now that I’m older, I don’t think I can justifiably …
Continue reading “Question for Writers: Staying in Touch With Your Market”