Keep it Simple

This is a post about sentence structure and wordiness. Which is something that I struggle with sometimes. I am of the firm belief that a book that's easier to read is of higher quality than a book that's hard to read. It is easy to write things that are hard to read. This is why…

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NookPress Sucks (and so does iBooks)

Here is a list of problems with NookPress: They told me my bank information didn't match my tax information, when I know for a fact that they DID match (and it's worked just fine through Amazon, they've even deposited money into my account with no issues whatsoever and all my information is exactly the same…

Making A Map

Today, I'm going to show you all how I made my maps! For this, I used only a pencil and paper and a program called Paint.net. Steps: Draw everything out For trees, do scribbles. For towns, do black dots and color them in or do horrible miniature drawings that won't show up in any detail…

Tension, Indiana Jones, and Deus Ex Machina

Last week, I watched Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it got me thinking: the Indiana Jones movies do an excellent job keeping you on your toes. I've lost count of how many times I've seen them, but they still have me biting my nails or sitting on the edge of…

Creating Characters Part 1

Almost every work of fiction, non-fiction, and every story anyone ever tells will contain one or more characters. Characters don't necessarily have to be human, or even living, to be characters. Maybe someone wants to write a short story about a rock that sits at the bottom of the ocean and watches as the water…

Just what exactly is a Mary Sue?

If you've been writing and doing research on character creation, you've probably heard of the dreaded Mary Sue.* But in case you haven't, a Mary Sue someone who: Is so incredibly beautiful that everyone and everything falls in love with her at first sight Is so trustworthy that even the most standoffish person with major…

Action and Filler

Action What's action? Action is anything that moves the plot forward. Action is the story's essence: it's the stuff that makes the story a story. The action is the plot: without action, there would be no plot. Action doesn't necessarily have to be people running around, doing exciting things: in many books, sections full of…

How to Describe Your Character’s Appearance

What to Describe I have a very clear picture of what certain characters are supposed to look like in my head: but these pictures only contain certain traits. For example, I know that Sarah is tall and dark-skinned with straight black hair, but I have no idea what shape her chin is or how large…

Contractions Aren’t Your Enemy

This is a major pet peeve of mine. I've seriously put down books before and refused to finish reading them because they didn't use contractions. CONTRACTIONS ARE NOT YOUR ENEMY. We're taught in school to write without them, and if you're writing a research paper or an essay, that's a good rule to stick to.…

Dialogue Part 2

Now that you know how to frame dialogue, let's talk about the dialogue itself. People don't speak in the same way that most people write. If you want your dialogue to sound real, you have to write it differently. So how do people really speak? There are a lot of interjections: people say things like…