Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Editing Basics”
I wanted to take a fresh look at how to research novels. I polled some of my writing buddies both unpublished and published and got some great ideas for researching.
Home Improvement?
If you’re trying to write a home improvement scene and are totally repair challenged, try Youtube.com.
Crazy Psychopath People?
This is obviously for people who write suspense. The FBI website offers research for you to profile your villain(s). Not for the faint of heart.
Local law enforcement
I remember the days of submitting to writing contests…if I didn’t final, I wanted to know…how close was I to the top 5? Because writing is a journey, and we’re …
Congratulations to the 2014 My Book Therapy Frasier Award Finalists!
Join us on September 26th in St. Louis, MO at the 2014 ACFW Conference/My Book Therapy Frasier Award and Pizza Party to discover the winner!
(Click on Read the Rest to discover the finalists!)
I watched the season finale of Once Upon a Time last night (*warning! Spoilers!*) and it was one of the best episodes in the series. Why? The tension! The plot was simple – the heroine, who’d finally found her happy ending with her family, accidentally fell back into time, and thwarted the epic, historical meeting of her parents. She pulled a “Back to the Future” and erased her future.
What does she want? To return home and live happily with her family. Her goal – make sure her parents met, somehow. Why? Because after a horrible childhood, she’s finally found a home. What’s at stake? Her life – and her son’s life.
And…standing in her way is the Evil Queen (as well as the lack of magic needed to open the time portal.)
Great set up for the episode – and even better, it makes for exactly the right ingredients to talk about how to create powerful tension in a story – and especially how to keep your Act 2 tension from saggy by creating tension in every scene.
Let’s start a definition of tension. Obstacles and Activity are not Tension. Tension is derived from a sympathetic character, who wants something, for a good reason, and who has something to lose, who then creates a specific, identifiable goal, only to run up against compelling, powerful obstacles, which then creates the realistic fear of failure.
In other words, the MBT Scene Tension Equation.
As wonderful as craft books are, a lot of times, our best teacher is life and our keen observance of it.
I read a book awhile ago called Live a Praying Life by Jennifer Kennedy Dean. I wasn’t reading it to improve my writing. I was reading it to better understand God’s design for prayer.
But as writers, we usually have that third eye (or ear) open and observant and aware. Ready to soak up some juicy insight. Some truth, some reflection of the human condition that we can apply to our characters and our stories.
So when I came upon this, I immediately switched into writing mode:
Jennifer writes, “Usually, what we call ‘the desire of my heart’ is really a secondary desire orbiting around the true desire. Usually, what we think we desire is really the way we have imagined the true desire will be met.”
She goes on to say, “We think we are asking for the desire of our hearts, but we are really asking for the desire of the moment. Often, in order to give you the desire of your heart, God will withhold the desire of the moment. He only says no as a prelude to a higher yes.”
