I’ve noticed an excessive amount of “thats” in the stories I’ve read. Most of the time, “that” doesn’t need to be there. Take this sentence: She felt that she was in danger Reads smoother as: She felt she was in danger. Think of reading a novel as driving on a winding road. There are many…
How do you make sure your characters don’t all sound the same? If you think about it logically, it shouldn’t be possible. I mean, we are just one person. There’s a name for people with a crowd of voices in their head. How can one person pretend to be several and portray each character realistically? I’ve been struggling…
Character physical descriptions. How much information do you give? Or rather, how much information do you need to give? Once again, there are no set-in-stone rules on how you handle this. From reading romance novels, I’ve gathered the author is expected to give a thorough description of how the characters look. On the other hand, we have…
You’d think with the awesomeness that is Google we could do all the research for our books online. Yeah, I thought that too and was way off. In a novel I wrote, I gave my protagonist a gun not thinking much about it. On the re-read, I realized I knew absolutely nothing about guns but made the weapon an important fixture…
There’s a lot to be said about a writer’s imagination but sometimes I have trouble seeing the things I put in my story. Nothing beats personal experience but we can’t literally go outside turn left and visit our fantasy world or live in a Gothic castle for the several months it takes to write our…
For the moment, I’ve stopped working on my second novel, as often, to focus on filling the holes in my world. I’m finding Powers to be the hardest part of World Building. It’s so complicated. I’ve been trying to find some way of organizing information to help me visualize it. Outside of putting it on…
In novel writing, is it really important to hook the read with a delicious opening line? A while ago, I would’ve said yes. No one has the patience to struggle through a story. When shopping in a brick and mortar store, some readers still let the first page decided whether or not they want the book. But, after reading The Last Wish and…
I love words. I love experimenting with them. My favorite author is E.A. Poe because he uses familiar words in ways I never thought of. I was blown away by Prince of Thorns because the language was gritty; it had a bite to it- same with Anne Bishop’s The Black Jewels and Ephemera series. I…
