Category: Technique
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Steering Your Writing Voyage
Writers are inundated with advice books for writing better fiction. See which actually made me revise parts of my novel even late-game. A list of books by and about masters of the craft.
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Writers: Make Conflict Sharpen Your Theme
Most writers think of supporting characters as helpers, villains, or comic relief. John Truby argues they’re something more: competing moral philosophies that sharpen your protagonist, strengthen your theme, and generate richer conflict. That single idea forced me to rethink scenes I’d already considered finished.
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Write as A Plotter? Edit as a Pantser.
In editing, a small causal fix can percolate into cascading character and plot improvements. When I experienced this recently, it was like an epiphany: Sometimes editing is just pantsing by another name. And plotters should embrace it. Make your editing pass with the pantser mindset even if the current read-through aims at line-edits (spelling, sound,…
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Writers: Theme is a Four-Letter Word
What I mean to say is I’ve found identifying and developing ‘theme’ makes me swear like a sailor. Theme is that tertiary-level ‘aboutness’ that often makes a fiction novel more thought-provoking, more cohesive, and more enduring after the plot’s surface-elements recede from our attention. So, if you’ve got theme(s), ‘good’ is your four-letter word. But…
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Writing a Novel? Pick Scriviner over Word.
To write a novel, a traditional ‘flat’ editor is not the most convenient tool. Scriviner is built with long-form books in mind. Here are some of the tips and tweaks I found made me productive in Scrivener.
