Writers love to read. Writers love other writers. Writers love the written word. There is nothing that makes my heart and my mind tingle more than a clever, profound, or artfully worded turn of phrase in something I’m reading. “A fanatic can no more shut his mouth than he can open his mind.” – Will…
Tag: RMFW
Cast Your Book
Writing can often become labor-intensive. We become so focused on rewrites and editing and tightening up the grammar and narrative and plotting and on and on and on… Sometimes it’s fun, for a break, to remind yourself why you’re writing this thing – at it’s most basic, because it’s fun to tell stories. One of…
Thrillers: Part 4 of 4: Plotting And Pacing
The key to any fiction is tension. Romantic tension, professional tension, survival, etc. In a thriller, the tension is primarily adversarial in nature. Here, whether our protagonist is striving for some sort of reconciliation, kumbaya moment with the antagonist or is willing to stop them at all cost, the thriller is driven forward by the…
Thrillers, Part 3 of 4: Villains
The villain in a thriller is generally not your run-of-the-mill murderer. He is someone with a goal in mind, and he is driving toward that goal, regardless of the damage he causes along the way. While he may enjoy that destruction, whether human (serial killer, assassin, strong-man dictator) or property (arsonist, bomber, unscrupulous land baron)…
Thrillers, Part 2 of 4: Heroes
Heroes in thrillers can be anyone: male, female, any walk of life, any level of expertise in solving crimes, spying, or thwarting villains. Heck, in the long-running television series Dexter, probably the single best example of genre-bending fiction, the hero was a serial killer. (If you haven’t binged this series, I submit it is among…