Novelists, Poets, Your Golden Age is Now…Ask William Blake

September 27, 2011

This is a great time for novelists and fiction writers of every form.

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What is Powerful Narrative?

August 24, 2011

A great story feels as natural as a tide, and just as inevitable.

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7 Tips for Getting to Flow – And Staying There

January 11, 2011

Flow. It’s not a plumbing emergency. It’s not religious ecstasy. It’s not satori–although it might feel like it. So what is it? We all know what it’s like to hit the sweet spot in writing your novel. Resistance falls away. Thoughts find words without struggle. Five minutes, 20 minutes, two hours — they all feel [...]

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Paragraphs Can be Narrative Power Tools

January 5, 2011

I don’t know about you, but I’m not a big fan of long paragraphs in fiction. There’s something dulling about an otherwise lively and gripping piece of prose fiction that never makes a pit stop. I find myself noticing where I would re-paragraph, and that’s not right: it pulls part of my attention out of [...]

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December 10, 2010
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How to Kill a Dialog Trick: Overuse It

November 7, 2010

Only a fine line separates the useful dialogue trick from being a generic cliche.

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Revising as You Go is Procrastination

October 7, 2010

Still on Chapter 2 of your first-draft novel? Let me guess. You won’t feel right about moving on until it’s just right. You’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve revised it. Just last week, you realized you needed to do a little more research–– Stop! I’ve been there, and guess what I call [...]

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Let Walk-on Characters Enrich Your Scenes

October 1, 2010

Walk-on characters, if you bring them to life, can do many good, subtle things for your story. I once knew an old (very old) actor, Rod, a friend of my mother’s, who announced one day he had been cast as a walk-on in a Woody Allen movie. I remember thinking, “how cool, to be 90 [...]

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When Typos Get Serious – As in a Writer’s Blog

September 4, 2010

Typos are bane of my writer’s life, particular when it comes online publishing.

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Hemingway’s Fiction Writing Style – Too American?

August 27, 2010

My thanks to Fee, for his good natured comment on a recent Hemingway post (see comment, left). Like many British readers, he feels Hemingway is over-rated by Americans, and pleads cultural differences. Specifically, Hemingway’s trademark style, the “relatively unvarying, staccato rhythm,” feels like somone is driving nails into his head. That’s serious. “I know you’re [...]

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