• Bookcase with Text Strategies For Finding Your Novel's Title
    For Writers

    Strategies For Finding Your Novel’s Title

    July 24, 2017

    Finding a fitting title for your novel can be a frustrating, tear-inducing, hair-pulling process. As I understand, editors and publishers might toy with and tweak your title before your book is published, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a strong working title for your WIP! A unique title will help your query stand out as you seek publication, and having a title that fits your work well can keep you focused on the overall message of your story as you write it.

    So, how do you select a fitting title? There’s a billion methods, but here’s a few strategies that could work for you:

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  • For Writers

    Use Your Character’s Strengths and Weakness to Build Your Novel’s Plot

    July 17, 2017

    Whenever I’m developing a plot for a story, I feel a little like a seamstress trying to make a whole quilt out of a few scattered, seemingly mismatched patches. I have a sense of an ending, a few random visuals or snippets of dialogue, and, if I’m lucky, the mental images of three or four characters I want to go on this journey with. The act of writing then becomes finding more patches and an overall working pattern to connect all this disparate pieces into something warm and snuggable, that you want to wrap up with in front of a cozy fire.

    What I’ve found is that, when you’re still in the process of brainstorming ideas of your story, it can help to take a good long look at your characters. Ask yourself, what are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? And how can I use those strengths and weaknesses to create the successes and triumphs of that character’s story arc?

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  • For Writers

    Developing A Fictional City ~ Worldbuilding for Fantasy Writers

    May 29, 2017

    Creating a city from scratch can be an intimidating task for a fantasy writer — you want your city to feel like a living, breathing place, with its own personality, elements of fun and fantasy, and believable enough and descriptive enough that the reader can imagine themselves plunked down into the middle of it.

    Consider some of the best, most vividly written cities in fiction. Closing your eyes, you can see the snow-capped cottages of Hogsmeade that look like illustrations on Christmas cards; you can see the colorful and extraordinary shops of Diagon Alley, cluttered with stacks of cauldrons, barrels of beetle’s eyes, hooting owls in ironwork cages; shoppers in ankle-length Wizard robes. You can see the stone buildings climbing up the mountainside of Gondor, you can see the shifting grass plains of Rohan, can picture the Shire with its farms and flowers and so many green hillocks punctuated with round front doors.

    Ugh. You can literally smell the honeysuckle and the pies cooling on windowsills.

    Fantasy villages, towns, and cities are scrumptious to read about, they’re visceral and eye candy and exciting. So, how do you go about creating one such (or many such) cities for your own fantasy novel?

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  • Wreath: Plotting in a Pinch Quick Guide to Plotting Your Novel
    For Writers

    Plotting in a Pinch: A Quick Guide to Plotting Your Novel

    May 15, 2017

    Wreath: Plotting in a Pinch Quick Guide to Plotting Your Novel

    Happy Monday, my beautiful writers!

    Planning your story can be tough. Revising your story into something resembling an actual novel can be nothing short of impossible. I want to share a real quick Guide to Plotting that’s been helping me through my (near endless) revisions — a quick look at the basic shape of a story. Don’t take this as a cookie-cutter formula, nor as the End All rule all novels must follow.  Rather, it’s a tried-and-true suggestion for the structure of a story that works, a story that moves along briskly, has coherence and cohesion to its plot points, and basically looks all pretty and book-shaped when completed.

    At the end of the document, I have a handy PDF of the guide you can download — a perfect insert for your writing notebooks!

    So, let’s get to it! I bring you Plotting in A Pinch: A quick, handy guide to the main plot points you’re going to want to hit for a beautiful, exciting story that actually feels satisfyingly like a story! (A possibility that can seem far off and whimsical when you’re drowning in revisions and sixteen different versions of a single scene, believe me.)

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  • For Writers,  Motivation

    Story Lost Its Steam? How to Stay Motivated as a Writer

    March 6, 2017

    You know the feeling. You were super excited about your book, all the words were flying out of you, the characters were yammering on inside your head so clearly you really could hear them, everything was going great—

    And now … you don’t know what to do.

    fullimagewtf

    First drafts almost always feel like this, at some point. That initial burst of inspiration has dwindled away and we start to feel pretty daunted; maybe our word count isn’t where we want it to be, or our story isn’t as good or exciting or as competently written as we’d hoped. Our Inner Editor is whispering nasty things in our ears. The urge to quit might be growing too strong to ignore.

    If you’re feeling exhausted and getting stuck in the endless ream of drivel you believe your draft to be, here are some things I think will help keep your spirits up, keep your fingers moving, and keep that word count growing.

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  • For Writers

    Sitting Down to Write: How to Start When You’re Stuck

    February 6, 2017

    We all know the feeling. You’ve got a scene in your head you want to write, but your brain isn’t working. Your fingers won’t cooperate. Maybe it’s your keyboard that has it out for you. Whatever the case, you can’t think. You want to start, but you’re stuck.

    Here are a couple of tricks I find really handy for that first half-hour when you’ve sat at your desk, opened your laptop or your notebook, and gone “… oh no.”

    1. Make a list of sensory words to put you in the mindset of your scene.

    What’s your character seeing? Hearing? Smelling? Touching? Say I’m writing a scene where my main character is running from a monster in a rainstorm. I might make a list like this:

    mud, muck, slippery, splatter, pouring, shoes squelching, shivering, sheets of rain, buckets, splashed, slipped; snarling, slobbering, growling, thundering paws; spikes of lightning, blinding, flash, silver; panting, whimpering, skidding, falling, crashing

    This’ll help you visualize the scene and get into the headspace.

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  • For Writers

    Are Your Characters Faceless Blobs? (Or, How Exhaustively Do You Describe Your Characters?)

    January 30, 2017

    Are Your Characters Faceless Blobs? (Or, How Exhaustively Do You Describe Your Characters?)

    Writers tend to be of two minds when it comes to describing a character’s physical appearance. Either they like to a) introduce each character with a fully-fleshed description that gives the reader an instant picture in their mind, or b) sprinkle in details sparingly, when they come up organically in the story.

    (Of course, there are some writers who prefer a third option, c) divulge nothing about the characters save, basically, their names. This tactic, I DO NOT recommend. The idea behind it is, I guess, noble: to let your readers form their own interpretation of a character’s physicality free from the author’s influence, and to avoid bogging down the prose with a clunky descriptive paragraph. I can see what these writers are trying to do, only most of the time … they don’t do it. They end up creating faceless blobs: featureless talking heads that leave little impression on the reader.)

    So, when it comes to describing characters, how much detail is too much? Should we saturate our pages with description, or sprinkle them?

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  • For Writers

    Writing Tip: Make Something Happen On Every Page

    January 23, 2017

    Maintaining a constant, forward momentum can be tricky when you’re writing a story. A great way to make sure your story is moving steadily ahead is to look at the action on a page-by-page basis:

    Have something happen, change, or be revealed by the end of every page in your story.

    When I go back over what I’ve written, I like to always make sure that, when I come to the end of every page, something has changed. Someone has asked a question, or answered one; a character has learned something new; seen something surprising; put on their jacket and gone somewhere else. A phone has rung, or a knock comes at the door; whatever happens, by the bottom of the page, we’re further along than we were at the top.

    Making sure every single page has a specific point, needs to be there, has done something to move your plot towards its conclusion, is a quick and easy way to give your story forward momentum, and give the reader a reason to keep turning pages.

    An earlier version of this post was originally shared on my old blog, Christina Writes. 

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  • For Writers

    What does it mean to “Kill Your Darlings”?

    January 16, 2017

    We all know those moments in editing, or writing, when it feels like the story is struggling. The plot’s sluggish, wheezing to a halt. Your prose feels uninspired. Your characters are making decisions that don’t entirely make sense. Your protagonist’s motivations are pin-balling around so fast she’s liable to get a concussion. Something isn’t working, and you can’t figure out what.

    A common piece of writing advice (attributed to a number of literary giants) is to “kill your darlings.” This is provocative advice, but what exactly does it mean?

    Kill Your Darlings, to me, means identifying the parts of your story you are not looking at objectively. That chapter you keep saying has to end with a certain beat. That line of dialogue you keep rewriting the scene to make sure you include. Does the character have to ask this question right now? When did you decide this? Why can everything else in this scene be rewritten, but this bit was scribed in indelible ink?

    When writing, and especially when editing, you’ve got to be willing to let your story change and grow organically. So, if you’re stuck in a scene, or if some element of your plot just isn’t working, ask yourself—is there something here, a moment, a story beat, a line of dialogue, a fact of backstory or worldbuilding, that I am fiercely protecting for no clear reason? Did I make some decision weeks, months, years ago, about this story that I have never reexamined? Is there something within this writing that I have never put through the same dispassionate red pen wringer as everything else?

    That’s probably your darling. That’s the blind spot that’s been wheezing and guttering without your realizing. And maybe it’s time to take it off life support.

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  • Blog,  For Writers

    Quick and Messy Writing Tip: Let Your Characters Disagree

    November 4, 2016

    Say your characters are standing before the moss-draped opening of a dark, gloomy cave, and they’re deciding whether or not to go in.

    You know they need to, because there’s a glimmering, all-powerful gem in that cave they need to find (as well as a nine-legged creature with slobbery fangs and poison barbs guarding it.) The question is, how do they get into the cave?

    Character A saying, “Let’s go in” and Characters B and C nodding and saying, “Sure, that sounds good” might get them through the door, but it doesn’t lend much by way of excitement — or character development.

    Agreeing, in fiction, isn’t nearly as exciting as disagreeing.

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