If You Give a Character a Lie … If you give a character a Lie that is tied to some Dark Moment in his past … he is going to …
Writer’s Math: Prep a Scene with 5+5+1
As a novelist, I thought I’d escaped all things numerical. Fine with me, as the mention of numbers is reason to cue the white noise in my brain. Through the …
The Easy Fix to creating MOTIVATION (and adding tension to your scene!)
Extreme Book Makeover: Saggy Scene Solutions – Creating powerful MOTIVATION Have you ever read a scene where the character says or does something that seems to come out of the …
What the Lord of the Rings Taught Me about Crafting Tension in My Novel
In our daily lives, we’re all about doing whatever we can to decrease tension. But when it comes to the lives of our fictional characters, we have to be willing …
Hitting the NaNoWriMo Blues – how to keep your scenes from sagging!
Are you in the middle of your NaNoWriMo project? By now, you might have 20-40K words written…and along with feeling tired, your scenes are feeling, well, tired. I get that. …