By Karen Duvall Description often gets overlooked for the power it can have in a story. Some dismiss it as no big deal, just use the five senses and you’re good to go. Some avoid using it altogether because they think readers skip that part to get to the action. Some worry over excessive exposition…
Author: Karen Duvall
Coming to a Genre Crossroads
I’ve always been big on mixing genres, long before it became a thing. I’ve blogged about it before. I love the various juxtapositions you can get by tossing a genre salad into an innovatively unique story. As an omnivorous reader, I can’t help but enjoy adding a little of this and a little of that…
The End: Bringing Your Novel to a Close
There’s a lot of emphasis put on story beginnings as well as its muddy middle, but what about the end? I think the topic deserves more consideration. Every book has a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning must be engaging enough to hook the reader, and the middle has to hold your audience’s…
Your Character’s Loss is Your Gain
Let’s talk about character and plot for a minute, and how one can’t exist without the other. Everything that happens in the plot forces your character to react, and your character’s reaction impacts what goes on in the plot. This creates a connected string of events that lead to the story’s ultimate conclusion. Action/reaction. Time…
The Next Big Thing
We’ve seen all these phenomenal books take off to best seller status – The Da Vinci Code, Gone Girl, Harry Potter, Fifty Shades of Gray – and now there’s mutterings within the writing community about what the next “big thing” will be. Well, those mutterings never cease, but it’s a new year and therefore new…