Tag: writing tips

While You Were Sleeping—The Difference Between Narration & Internal Dialogue

Internal dialogue is the thoughts, dreams, stream-of-consciousness stuff inside a character’s mind only the reader is privy to. Most people talk to themselves, think in at least partial sentences, talk themselves into and out of all kinds of things, they weigh consequences, wrestle with past experiences all in their head in a split second. How many smart girls make bad decisions about men?

Creating a Protagonist Readers Will LOVE

Writers need readers to rally to our protagonist’s team, to like her and want to cheer for her to the end. How do we do this? Give her flaws, and humanize her. Additionally, if our characters are fully actualized in the beginning, there will be no character arc so our story will be one-dimensional and flat.

Fueling the Muse Part 2—How to Give Your NaNo Story a Beating Heart and a Skeleton

We’re discussing ways to fuel the muse before NaNo. Yesterday, we discussed movies and how to use them, and I will delve a tad further with that today. One of the major reasons many writers fail to complete the story is there isn’t a single CORE story problem in need of resolution. The story dies because it lacks a beating heart and a skeleton. Stories with no hearts and skeletons are primordial adverb ooze and not good for much other than scaring small children.

Fueling the Muse for NaNoWriMo—Part One

Great movies have great dialogue. Study it. How do characters talk? When I get submissions, one of the major problems I see is in dialogue. Coaching the reader, brain-holding, and people simply talking in ways that are unrealistic. For instance, most of us, when having a conversation, don’t sit and call each other by name.

How Many Licks, um Books, Does It Take to Get to the Top of the Best-Seller List?

History demonstrates time and again that it takes roughly 10,000 hours (or a million words, depending on who we listen to) to reach the status of true artist and masters of our craft.