September 2022

I’m second-guessing myself: should I include more information on how to write reader check-ins or not?  At first you have to think about writing reader check-ins. It doesn’t necessarily come naturally.  You: “I just want to tell the story!” Reader (eventually): “It’s a great story but it’s not for me…” You: [Sobbing] It seems like […]

(Sorry, I really thought I was going to get to prologues. I did not.  Not even close.) Every time the author stops the current forward momentum of the plot to explain something, describe the setting, give context, or give backstory, we’re going to call that a “reader check-in.” It’s like the author is saying, “In

OMG. If you haven’t heard, I’ve had drama.  My boss got fired (with cause). There was a metric assload of tasks to do to try to get the department back on track, with every day bringing a new surprise for stuff that wasn’t done at all or done in such a way that left it

We are back to Writing Craft Volume 3! Apologies – work went nuts after my boss got fired, and then *I* got laid off! Aieee! But the real reason is that I struggle to be confident about my writing techniques. As one does.  Welcome to new folks! Let me know if you need anything or

All, I’m giving a presentation on how to write a book description that is a version of the material I posted here earlier, with some new additions based on study and experiments of late. So this includes things like how to come up with a title and how to write a story by the seat

Aaaaand I had today’s post all ready to go, then went, “I didn’t actually explain what setting was.”  The next thought was, “So I’ll write a short intro to explain what setting is, no worries! I’ll just add it to the post!” No.  Every time I run into what I think is a simple omission

In this volume of Writing Craft, we’ve covered a lot of ground on the theories behind writing details: what details actually are, types of details, how details may affect readers’ brains, how to summarize or call back or forward to details, and so on. All this talk about details may have seemed like we had

Later on, I’ll talk more about structure in popular genre fiction, which is basically “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you just told them, and repeat.”  What we think of as foreshadowing is kind of just an extreme version of the constant foreshadowing that we need to be

(The thing about learning how to pick apart writing like this is that it’s very labor intensive up front, but you also understand how to do some really interesting things by default. Foreshadowing is one of those things! We just got done talking about summarizing, by the way. See the previous post for the example

When I started writing this section, I went, “WHYYYYYYY am I bothering to write this? People shouldn’t be writing much summary anyway. Okay, I’ll mention it.” Then I went to The Princess Bride to pull up a few examples and really paid attention. Nearly every quote summarized something. I will grant you that part of