“I have no plans to die today,” said every main character ever. In most modern media, being a main character is a free ticket through the story. Convenient for characters, but boring for readers. That’s what I talked about last month: killing characters and convincing readers that disaster could happen at any moment in your novel.
Writers tend to instinctively sense that grammar, mechanics, and style are important. But what are they, really? How are they distinct from each other? Do they overlap? And do they actually matter, or are they just terms that writing experts throw around to sound fancy?
Have you ever finished reading a story and your response was meh? You didn’t hate it or love it—the story just existed. Have you ever read a story that was exactly what you expected after skimming the back cover? I have. I don’t reread those stories. When people sit down to read a book, they’re eager to be taken on a journey.
“Do I need an editor?” I’ve seen this question countless times on blogs, forums, and Facebook posts. I understand why authors feel doubtful. The price tag can be steep, and you may be unsure whether the results are worth the cost. Many writers have misconceptions, though, about what professional editing actually is. Here
are three truths you may not realize about the practice.
Comic relief characters have become a byword for flat characters in many creative communities. They’re quickly spotted and scorned by editors and other critics. For the most part, comic relief characters deserve that treatment. They’re often two-dimensional, predictable, unimportant to the plot, and useless overall.
Fortunately, writers’ minds run primarily on imagination and hope; otherwise the obstacles that bar publication and the unlikelihood of prosperity would discourage most from picking up the pen.
I have a couple confessions to make. First, I am biased toward poetry, not because I believe it is inherently better than other art forms (like novel writing), but because poetry is largely misunderstood. People interrogate poetry to gauge its worth, asking questions such as, what is the point, why are we reading this, and why do people even write this?
When I attempted my first NaNoWriMo challenge in November 2017, I was intimidated! Even though I wrote fairly consistently, I’d never written every day or tracked my word count before. Plus, I was dealing with a chronic disease that’s main symptoms are pain, brain fog, and fatigue.
Are there pitfalls to writing Christian fiction? Unfortunately, yes. The inherent nature of Christian fiction is certainly not evil, but our approach to it can easily be misguided by four prevalent sins.
Have you ever read a Christian novel with a message so preachy that you wanted to shut the book, walk away, and forget about it? Have you ever worried that you’re committing the same mistake in your writing? Here are two tools you can use to subtly but effectively deliver powerful messages without turning off readers.
