Your readers will hate you, but it’s good for them. Do NOT protect your characters. Screw up their lives more than a meth-addicted multi-personality mother-in-law. Your characters NEED a crucible.
19 results for finding nemo
Jan 13 2014
The Tips to Maximize Conflict in Your Novel
Whenever I blog about craft, I’m coming from the perspective of a long-time editor. I do understand that the creation process is vastly different from the editing process. I know this because I’ve been on both sides. But, if you want to minimize revisions and rewrites, it helps to have some basic editorial skills in …
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May 17 2013
Talk is Cheap—For Great Fiction Drive the Demons to the Surface
These tough existential questions are what drive the tension of the book because the big questions are placed into context so they can be tested—a regular guy and his boy in a world that has gone horribly wrong. Yes, there is some internalization, but the outside characters and circumstances force that existential question out of the character’s mind and into reality.
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Mar 19 2013
5 Common Mistakes that Will KILL Your Novel
Even literary fiction involves some outside force that is causing the contemplation, depression, rebellion, etc. Whether it is the decline of the aristocracy and rise of the middle class (Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”) or implosion of society and humans turned cannibals in Cormac McCarthy’s Pultizer-winning The Road, we always have an outside pressure and an antagonist to drive the story momentum.
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Jun 18 2012
Spice Up Your Fiction–Simple Ways to Create Page-Turning Conflict
Actual photo of me trapped in an elevator with a 2 year old with an injured hand. THAT is conflict. One of the hardest concepts for new writers to understand is the antagonist. I have even gone through great lengths to teach about the antagonist and his/her many faces. We have what I call the …
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International Association of Professional Writers & Editors
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