I’m not going to lie to you: Middles are hard. They are still hard for me, almost twenty years since I wrote my first one. And I have to admit I was kind of dreading writing this post. How am I going to tell all of you how to write […]
Monthly Archives: June 2014
21 posts
One of the hardest questions for novice writers to answer is: where should I start telling the story? When I first started writing books, especially using discovery writing, I tended to start in the wrong place. That is, I had a lot of pages of not much happening before the inciting incident (the point of […]
A couple of days ago I told you that three of the most useless words in a writer’s lexicon were beginning, middle and end. I’m going to backpedal slightly today and explain why that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Yesterday we learned that plot is basically a chain of linked […]
A small confession to start things off: Plot is actually my strong point with writing. Ever since I first started writing, I’ve thought in terms of plot. My earliest stories were basically strings of sentences of “then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.” I’ve never had […]
Today was another landmark day for me as a writer. I didn’t increase my sales rank on Amazon or reach my thousandth like on Facebook. What did happen was, to me, far more important in my progression as a writer. Today I met a young lady whom I was twenty years […]
What is story? At an early juncture in my writing journey, this question was answered with: “a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” Think about that for a minute. Beginning, middle, end. A life has a beginning, a middle, and an end; does that make it a story? […]