Craft
Craft

Craft

These articles concentrate on the craft of writing. Use the menu on the right to get more specific or just browse them sequentially.

Writing Great Dialogue

Taking up as much as half of a book, dialog might be the most important part of writing to master. And it is far more likely that readers will remember what a character said, rather than how great a certain description was. But how do you write great dialogue, and how do you do it consistently? Dialogue Isn’t Speech Note that the title of this article is writing great dialogue, not writing realistic dialogue. Great dialogue sparkles, illuminates character, provides worldbuilding, moves the plot along, and creates memorable scenese for the reader. It is often, however, not very realistic. Real...

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The Three Act Story Structure

The Three Act Story Structure is one of the most basic story structures and one of the most useful, in my opinion. It gives the author plenty of room for inspiration, innovation, and invention while still keeping them on track to an exciting and satisfying conclusion. Some may need a more detailed plan (the 27 chapter structure extrudes this structure into granular detail), but for those who seek only a little order to help them tell their tale, this structure does the job.

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The 27 Chapter Structure

The 27 Chapter structure is kind of a recursive version of the Three Act Structure, breaking down the three parts of each act into three chapters so that there are twenty-seven chapters. But the form of the three-act is still in there with the inciting incident, the plot twist, the midpoint, all falling in roughly the same spot as the three-act. It’s a good structure to reference if you’re lost or running out of ideas in the middle of the book. It can help you understand a little better how to move through the three-act structure — or any structure....

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How to Avoid Cliched Phrases

Cliches are sneaky little things. The commonness that makes them cliches also makes them hard to spot; we use them so often in our normal life, we write them without thinking. “It was raining cats and dogs.” “He was bored stiff.” “I’m down in the dumps.” They are all descriptive and everyone will know what you mean, but use them too often and readers will eventually be bored with your prose. I’d rather have someone hate my book than be bored by it. Here’s some simple methods to remove cliches from your writing. 1. Use strong words Cliche phrases are...

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Not F*cking Up Sex Scenes: Making Love Make Sense

If your sex scene isn’t integral to the plot, then you’re not doing it right. Maybe you’ve heard that sex is just supposed to happen every fifty or a hundred pages. Wrong. Even if what you’re writing is erotic romance, the moment needs to be right, and something should happen to move the characters along or the scene will fall flat and feel gratuitous. The most important thing about writing a sex scene is remembering that it is, in fact, a scene like any other in your novel.  That means that all the same rules apply. When writing sex, you...

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Using the Appropriate Amount of Realism in Your Writing

Like everything else in writing, the appropriate amount of realism is going to be very genre dependent. If you’re writing a gritty crime story, you’re going to want a lot of it; a fairy tale romance, maybe not so much. But how do you decide how much realism is right for your story, and how do you go about putting it in (or taking it out)? Let’s start with some examples. The first is from a story I was critiquing that was written by a very good writer. And one of the things this writer does extremely well is write...

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Show Don’t Tell: The Bad Writing Advice That Sounds Good

If you’ve been a writer for more than say, an hour, you’ve already received numerous pieces of advice on how to do it. And while a lot of it may actually be good advice, there is undoubtably a great deal that is bad. Problem is, some of that bad advice may appear to be good. Even worse, some of that bad advice is widely accepted as good. “Show Don’t Tell” is one of those. It is one of the most pervasive pieces of bad advice masquerading as good out there. The problem isn’t that it’s necessarily bad advice, it’s that...

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Anthologies: How to Create, Edit, and Publish an Anthology

What is an Anthology? Classically, there are two specific definitions you need to know about short fiction. A Collection is a group of stories, all by the same author. An Anthology, conversely, is a group of stories by a variety of different authors. We’re here to talk about the latter. Generally, an anthology has a central theme, around which all the authors involved have written. It might be sword and sorcery fantasy. Or hard-boiled private detectives. Or military science fiction. (I’ve owned and read all of those at one time or another.) Alternatively, it might be part of a “Year’s...

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The Indie Mindset

Let’s talk mindset. Many of you have come out of the Traditional Publishing (TradPub for short) world, either directly, or having been raised and trained to think that way. You see a specific career arc that you need to follow, in order to achieve success. Does this sound familiar? Start in short fiction, honing your craft at 5000-word stories until you think you have the ability to write a pretty good story for one of the periodicals in your genre. Then you start submitting them and to various open anthology calls until you start to achieve some level of success....

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