Kristen Lamb

Author's posts

The Novel That Isn’t a Novel—Do You Really Have a Story?

We have been doing a lot of talking about structure lately because if we as writers don’t grasp structure? We can never deliver story. Sometimes to see what a novel IS, it helps to look at what the novel is NOT. Thus today I am going to pick on the most common “novels” I see …

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How to Exorcise Inner Demons

We’ve been talking about the most critical flaw in most new manuscripts, and that is the lack of the CORE STORY PROBLEM. In order to make things simpler, I came up with the concept of the BBT (Big Boss Troublemaker) because the core antagonist is not always a villain. He/She/It merely has a goal that …

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Faces of a Fatally Flawed Manuscript

Last time, we talked about the core antagonist or as I like to call it, the Big Boss Troublemaker. The BBT is responsible for creating the core story problem in need of being solved and we will continue our discussion on the BBT and different types of antagonists later. But before we do that, I …

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The Engine of Fiction—Meet the Antagonist

One of the major issues with first-time novels is that the young writer fails to understand what a novel really is. All great stories are about one thing and one thing only—PROBLEMS. More specifically? Every good story has one core problem in need of being resolved. Granted, there will be many other problems along the way, …

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The X Factor—How Character Determines Plot

Last time we talked about paradigms, and how paradigms are what make the difference between a flat one-dimensional character background and a fully dimensional creation. The paradigm is the meaning of the background, the character’s interpretation of their own experiences. The context. We all know there is an inherent X factor to humans. Theologians, scientists, geneticists, …

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