It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenesuntil they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway,critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drovehim to work hard, o...
Before you go ahead with a flashback, ask yourself if you canmake the same impact on your reader through conflict in thenow of the novel. If the answer is no, then the flashback isnecessary, but remem...
So far, we’ve discussed how you start with a germinal idea and what makes a good one; then we discussed the villain profile and how to create a villain with a dark mission, who will take actions to ge...
Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at theold typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing popsinto your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you dowhen this happ...
Readers find most flashbacksintolerable. Yet a lot of neophyte writers flash back like mad.Why? No one but the Creator of the Universe knows for sure,but there is a likely answer: they find the confli...
Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got.
You can kill the spell of identification just as easily as youcan create it—if you lose the readers' sympathy for the character.You can lose reader sympathy by having your character commitacts of crue...
For some it is harder towrite a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.
A story is a narrative of consequential events involving worthy human characters who change as a result of those events. THE
Fiction can be more real to the reader than reality itself because fiction is the of life
To set a forest on fire, you light a match. To set a character on fire, you put him in conflict.