I’ve designed parts of multiple alien languages for my Chocoverse books. It’s one of the most fun parts of worldbuilding. I love building lexicons and language rules, and thinking about how prefixes and suffixes can affect a basic word’s meaning. Depending on how much of the language will actually be used in a book or […]
Bear with me. I know most of you are writing for adults, but I want to talk in term of kid’s cartoons for a minute. When it comes to aesthetics, there’s nothing that makes the concept easier to understand than animation meant for developing minds. The 2019 Dora the Explorer movie played hard into the […]
One way to attach readers to your character is to present her with a problem, and then let us into how she FEELS about it. If you make those feelings specific – and unique to her – then we can feel them too. Let us in on the character’s specific thoughts, internal physical sensations and/or […]
So you’ve come up with a clever twist that you think no one will ever see coming. And you send it to your beta readers, waiting to hear back that the shock and surprise of the twist had them in awe. Maybe that’s exactly what happens. Or . . . maybe they tell you the […]
One of the first pieces of advice everyone gives to new writers is show, not tell. However, it’s a bit more complicated than that. You couldn’t show everything that happens to your character from the beginning of the novel to the end. There are some paint-drying boring things that happen to a character (such as […]
Every scene in your manuscript should have a purpose, and move the story forward. So obviously, you don’t want to waste the reader’s attention with scenes that relay the same information. But what about the same emotions? Repetition leads to boredom. If, like me, you tend to write long and have to trim back your […]
Ever wonder why so many characters have sidekicks? It’s not so much that the character couldn’t do whatever actions the sidekick takes in the story. It’s that the audience needs to understand the underlying motivations behind the character’s actions, and a sidekick is an easy way to get the protag to vocalize her reasoning. One […]
When you watch a gymnast doing a parallel bars routine, it is easy to get caught up in the grace and the power – coupled with an I-could-never-do-that kind of awe. Nothing ruins that experience – or the gymnast’s score – faster than failing to stick the landing. A double hop – or worse, falling […]
We have Bud Humble as our guest speaker for Saturday Night Write on March 16, 2019. So I thought I’d invite him to stop by the blog. He will be discussing The Benefits of Hands-On Research. So here’s what I asked Bud: Hi Bud! Hey Amber! Thank you for chatting with me today! It’s my […]
Blog Post – Poetic Technique for Prose Writers I love language. The sound of words. The way a pause can imply a character taking a breath. The way a strong image can stay with you for days. The fact that I as a writer can tell you how my character feels inside, and if I […]
