Essential Guide to Writing a Novel

Here are ten smaller techniques that'll improve our story, each maybe not big enough for a full segment but worthwhile to help make our story gripping and our sentences shine.  Also, here are thoughts about our story's ending; isn't HEA (happily-ever-after) a formula and cliche?  And: how to show rather than tell about the weather.

Here is a 20-episode master class on ...

What do Elizabeth Bennett, Anne Shirley, Frodo Baggins, Jo March, Harry Potter, and Huckleberry Finn have in common?  Readers love them.  We can create such a character, one readers will long remember and maybe reread the storyl just to be with the character again. Also, adverbs and adjectives can weaken sentences. Here is why and how to avoid them.

Here is a 20-episo...

We writers can train ourselves to peel the onion: to look more deeply at places and people, and so set forth our discoveries in lovely language in our stories.  Here's how the masters do it.  Also, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "action is character" is a strong technique for revealing our characters' personalities to readers, and I talk about "action is character" here.

Readers love dialogue.  It's as if they are part of the scene, sitting there and listening to our characters argue or romance each other or plan something important.  Here are additional techniques to grip readers with our dialogue. Also: V.S. Naipaul's rules of writing.

Here is a 20-episode master class on fiction writing—a start-to-finish course covering plot, charac...

Dialogue is like a Snickers candy bar: it's good.  Here are eight techniques for making conversations in our story engage the reader, things we should do and things we should avoid.  Also, how did Sue Monk Kidd handle her first rejection? And Meg Cabot on how to keep going so we finish our story.