As a writer, I’m sure you’ve been asked at least once in your life “where do you get your ideas?” And if you’re anything like me, you don’t necessarily have an answer. It’s more like, you just start writing something and the ideas kind of pop in on their own. It’s almost a subconscious thing, […]
4 Questions to Ask When You Create Your Main Character
On a recent episode of the podcast, we discussed the idea of having the basics of a story planned, but no characters to move the plot. We pretty much come to the conclusion that a plot without characters isn’t actually a plot. I don’t want to rehash what we talked about in this post, but […]
Podcast Episode 70 – The Painfully Average Protagonist
In this episode of The Write Good Books Podcast, Jason and Scott take a look at a common character trope, the painfully average protagonist, and some of the cliches the go along with it, including looking in mirrors and the dreaded “instalove.” What works and what doesn’t work with this type of character? Click the […]
4 Tips for Writing a Flashback
Flashbacks can be a very useful too for introducing a character’s backstory or revealing secrets about him to the reader. But when used improperly, a flashback can make a reader groan, skip ahead, or even put a book down for good. So what is the best way to use a flashback? It may depend on […]
Five Links Friday 1/12/18
The weekend is here, and so is another edition of Five Links Friday. Enjoy! 1. Let’s start of with a post by Laura Vanderkam making the point that The Earlier You Start Writing, The Better at The Reading Lists. I couldn’t agree more, and one of my biggest regrets is that I waited so long […]
Writing Flash Fiction Makes You A Better Writer
I was going to begin this post with the sentence “I haven’t written much flash fiction,” but I went and counted and see that I’ve published five flash fiction stories, and also have one more scheduled to be published this fall. So actually, nearly one-fourth of my published short stories have been flash fiction. I […]
The Reading Process I Use At My Ezine
This is part three of my impromptu series of posts about running an ezine. In the first part, I looked at what types of opening sentences I don’t like to see, and in part two I looked at the types of endings that are likely to result in a rejections. So here I would like […]
Five Things I Don’t Like to See in a First Sentence
I’ve often claimed that I can tell if I’ll accept or reject a story at Theme of Absence as early as the first sentence. Mind you, I don’t actually make that decision until I finish the piece (if flash fiction) or read at least of third of it (if a longer piece). But still, in […]
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next Page »