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 […]
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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 […]
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? […]
When I started learning how to write, one word came up over and over again: voice. For years, I heard that word, was vaguely terrified by it, ignored it and kept writing. I didn’t really understand what it meant or what all the fuss was about. I just knew that […]
When I first started writing, my drafts would often read like this: Paragraph of description–> followed by paragraph of action–> more description–> block of dialog–> paragraph of backstory or exposition–> etc. As readers, we know instinctually that there is something wrong with this pattern. When we read our favorite books, […]