Today’s Story Course comes from a lesson I learned from reading: why dialog and character interaction are so important to reader engagement. Authors are (for the most part) more in love with their main characters than their readers are. This may seem obvious. Writers spend (mostly) years with their characters, discovering their world and writing […]
I got the idea for my first novel in late Oct 2006. I toyed with it in fits and starts but I didn’t actually start writing it until Feb 2008. It was a fairy tale and the story of how I thought of it and what it became will be the beginning of my Idea […]
Last night I wrote 300 words in my current novel. It wasn’t much – a little paragraph and a snippet of a scene. But there was something about it that was immensely satisfying. And then I figured out what was so great about 300 words. They were my words. My style and my voice and […]
Stories are tricky things. People have different things they care about, especially when adapting something from one medium to another. Is the heroine still blond?Do they have that line that I loved from chapter 4?Where is that scene with the car chase?Is everything even in the correct sequence? But there is a core of what […]
I saw Man of Steel last weekend and as I was driving away, listening to a song on the radio (and I truly don’t even remember which one) I had this thought… And I’m warning you ahead of time, it’s not a revolutionary insight. It’s kind of obvious, actually. But when it struck me I […]
One of the things I wanted to be when I was a kid was a trapeze artist.Not because I wanted to run away with the circus or anything. Just because I wanted to flip and fly and tumble through the air. I’ve always been fascinated with gymnasts and acrobats and longed to experience what that […]
As an aspiring author one of the things I’ve learned is that it’s easy in this writing/publishing industry to feel like you’re at everyone else’s mercy. This isn’t new territory for me after living in LA for years. Whether you’re a writer, actor, screenwriter, director of photography, costume designer, or almost any other creative profession […]
I don’t know what it is about Harry Potter that everyone seems to have a story on how they read the series; the night(s) they camped out to get the latest book at midnight or seeing the films; or the impact the books and movies had in their lives (both reading and real). It’s interesting […]
The beauty of English is that we have hundreds of thousands of words. Sometimes we have several words for almost the same thing. almost. The fun in having a large vocabulary is getting to play with nuance. The idea for this post started when I was listening to the radio. And it was a really […]
I’m not a plotter. Character and dialog I’m completely comfortable with but plot is a struggle for me (hopefully less and less as a I write more and more but for now it’s tough). So, I’m always looking to learn more about plotting or hear how successful authors address plot or read things that give […]