Q: What contributes conflict to your story and characters? A #1: TENSION with a slice of underlying tension The Breakout Novelist by Donald #Maass is full of hints and writing exercises that can strip down a conversation to its basics in order to produce great tension. Maass teaches, “…it is not information itself that nails…
Have you caught the Wordle bug yet? Each morning The New York Times posts a new Wordle puzzle up on the internet and you have one day to solve it. The answer is a five-letter word and you get six tries. Each guess must be a valid five-letter word. After you type in your guess…
“If music be the food of love, play on,” wrote Shakespeare. But it’s not just love that’s fueled by music. Moods, memories, energy level, motivation (or lack of it), desires, fears—all of these can be influenced by an inspired lyric or a well-crafted melody. And let’s not forget music’s effect on creativity. Many of the…
Vella: The Longer and Shorter of It A few months ago, I blogged about my experiences on Amazon’s new(ish) serial platform and interviewed Vella author N. Y. Seely. You can find that article here if you want some background on the platform overall. Vella has been up and running, albeit with some glitches, for about…
According to Wikipedia, “Speculative fiction is a broad category of fiction with elements that do not exist in reality, recorded history, nature, or the present universe.” This brings me the heart of my article: How can authors get their readers to believe in a chimerical world that does not (and likely cannot) exist in reality?…