The Roanoke Public Library is having their Teen Summer Reading Program this year with lots of events and of course reading! I have prepared a one-hour presentation for the event on Plotting Your Way Through a Short Story. Here’s a little of what they said: We librarians love a good challenge and as such, we’ve […]
I will be presenting this program for teens as part of the Roanoke Library summer reading program. This interactive event will delve into why these two characters are so important to story telling.
I’ve been binge-watching past episodes of Master Chef. In one challenge from a few seasons ago, the contestants were supposed to make a dozen doughnuts. Some of them went a bit nuts with it – one contestant did twelve different flavors. Some of them came up with elaborate fillings – but when the judges went […]
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 […]
I hope everyone survived NaNoWriMo. How’d you do? Even if you didn’t hit 50K, I hope you enjoyed the experience, especially if it was your first time. And you now have more words than you started the month with. The thing I love about NaNo is the need to meet a deadline, which forces you […]
Character agency refers to a character’s ability to make decisions that affect the outcome of a story. But it also refers to a character’s freedom to be themselves in the story world. They’re going to want to walk their own path, wherever that leads them. It’s possible for you as an author to violate a […]
Are you ready for a new writing adventure and some new writing challenges? So excited about the new series of classes I’m doing for UTA Continuing Education this fall. There was such an overwhelming positive response to the Novel 1-2-3 classes that they’ve decided to test out Novel 4-5-6. If you have some writing experience, […]
This whole month, I want to talk about the relationship between writing and reading. I’ve talked to so many writers who say they don’t read inside their own genre because they’re afraid of copying someone else’s idea. (More on this later – I’m planning an entire post on genre as a conversation.) Or they don’t […]
In 1863 Gustov Freytag, first known as a playwright and later a novelist, published Die Technik des Dramas. (Released in English much later as Freytag’s Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic Composition and Art.) While his novels reflected some of the ugliness and turbulence of the time in which he was writing, the […]
I recently had a writer ask me which one of his many ideas he should follow up on. There is no easy answer to that question, because it all depends on the writer’s motivation. Is he wanting to know which one is the most marketable? Well, I can’t exactly predict the market in two to […]
