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5 Reasons You May Want to Write Your Novel as a Short Story First
“The first draft of a novel is supposed to be terrible.” We’ve all heard that charming advice, and it’s usually true. But why do many first drafts fail? Because writers lose steam halfway through. I can’t tell you how many manuscripts I’ve abandoned after hitting a rough patch somewhere between the midpoint and the final act. Only a handful of my novels have ever reached “the end,” and the most structurally sound one came from a short story.
Why You Need to Understand the Biblical Fall to Accurately Depict Broken Characters
When Adam and Eve bit into the forbidden fruit to experience the taste of both good and evil, they consciously rebelled against God. Broken, they plunged into an existence fraught with sorrow. In the shadow of their future, the rest of humanity plunged as well. We now live submerged, choking on water we weren’t meant to breathe. The people around us thrash and cough and drown every day. But how often do we think about the fall when we’re developing characters?
SE Podcast #31: Unsung Heroes of the Writing Process
Producing a novel isn’t a one-man show. Today Josiah DeGraaf, Brianna Storm Hilvety, and Gabrielle Pollack discuss the hidden heroes who help an author give readers a fully fleshed-out and polished story.
Shoulders
I straighten my back, and shoulder blades take on a new meaning. Tension stretches its hands around my neck and claws my skin at the same time—like twisted thorns clinging to the seams in my shirt. I laugh sometimes
that I can’t tell if the creaking is from my bed or my back, but while people are responding with “Work on better posture” or “You’re too young to feel like this,” I’m nodding my head with the strength of my last coffee.
3 Benefits You Miss if You Don’t Write Short Stories
Many writers, myself included, tend to devalue short stories because of their brevity. “Real” writers are supposed to craft novels. Some of the most famous authors of the twentieth century, however, were masters of the short story. Think William Faulkner, Ray Bradbury, Oscar Wilde, Flannery O’Connor, and O. Henry. At only 5 or 10 percent the length of a novel, a short story may seem far less intimidating, if not downright easy, to write. But short stories come with their own set of challenges that can help hone your skills for larger projects.
How to Breathe New Life into Stereotyped Settings
When we hunt for clichés to remove from our manuscripts, we pay attention to characters, plot lines, and even phrases, but we have a habit of overlooking settings. Genres, however, tend to recycle details to the point that readers can predict the culture they’re going to encounter before opening a book. They might still enjoy the story if it’s crafted well, but they won’t experience the wonder of exploring unfamiliar territory. As writers, we should be striving for greatness, but we can’t achieve this goal if we rely on copy-and-pasted settings.
How to Prevent Clichés from Ruining Your Story’s Prose
The sky’s the limit to the number of clichés that can infiltrate writing. In fact, I intend to dump a truckload into this article to illustrate why writers should avoid them like the plague. However, I also believe we ought to tip our hats to clichés. Because the phrases were crafted well, people repeated them until overuse rubbed off the gilding. Now they’re commonplace. But I still appreciate their origins, and I’m going to show you how to dig out the creative potential buried beneath them.
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