Improv Skills Can Make You a Better Fiction Writer

June 30, 2010

Novelists and short fiction writers can learn new skills from plunging into the discipline of longform improv.

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Subplots––Chicken Soup for Your Novel

June 11, 2010

Subplots are what put the meat on the bones of novel length fiction.

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Characters Can be Mysterious…but Not to You

June 10, 2010

Here’s why you can never know too much about your characters,

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Writer’s Block Begone – or How to Write When You Can’t Write

May 12, 2010

CALL IT WRITER’S BLOCK, self-sabotage, wretched indolence, what you will. Sometimes you stop writing––and it hurts.
Every fiction writer has at least one writer’s block “war story.” In a recent Poets & Writers, “Why I Write” column, Dawn Haines, who teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire, remembers what happened when, free of MFA Program [...]

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Participial Phrases can Make Your or Break Your Fiction

May 3, 2010

The participial phrase is the srongest tool at the fiction writer’s command. But deploy it properly, or you risk causing confusion in the average reader–and rejection from the professional.

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Show Don’t Tell – The Video

April 16, 2010

I don’t know about you, I’m a heavily visual and aural learner. And so…presenting “Show Don’t Tell––The Video.”

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Write Story in 1 Hour or Less? Try This

April 5, 2010

“Hey, how long you been working on that novel, man? Forever, right? When are you going to finish that sucker up?”
IT’S 5:22 AM. I’VE BEEN AWAKE since 3:45 with a case of the distractions. Something keeps nagging at me: if I’m awake, I should be downstairs working on my novel. But I’m stuck on one [...]

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Your Book’s Coming Out. Are You Ready to Rock?

March 29, 2010

Remember that novel you published a while back?

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Lost in Revision––When Making Your Novel *Better* Makes it Worse

March 26, 2010

Has one of your novel’s trusted readers ever remarked, “You know, I liked it better before”

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5 Tips for Instantly Improving Your Novel

March 19, 2010

BEFORE WE GET TO THE 5 TIPS…a testiment of sorts:
Somewhere along the road of life, I joined The Church of 80/20. Not that I’ve always been devout, I haven’t. But like most converts, I’m even more passionate about my chosen believe than if I had been born to it. In the Church of 80-20 [...]

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