From Lord of the Rings to Star Wars, across sci-fi and fantasy, good worldbuilding is what makes genre fiction stand out. Well-constructed worlds are legendary—they capture audience’s imaginations, and they make readers want to live in the story forever. What would Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series be without the Discworld itself? What would The Wizard of […]
Every writer has to know how to create suspense. If you can’t create suspense in your book, readers will always feel shortchanged and indifferent to your story. Suspense is THE crucial technique to creating a riveting plot. Creating suspense is really about evoking an emotion in the reader, an emotion akin to happiness, sorrow, or […]
The keys to a story are the characters, and the key to characters is knowing the difference between round and flat characters. This way, you can be intentional about writing characters who make connections with your audience and also writing characters who support that connection. When building a cast, it’s important to think about the […]
Writers spend a lot of time worrying about point of view, unless they don’t, in which case they are destined to be rejected by literary agents and editors everywhere. Point of view is critical to a book’s success. It’s also one of the most common things new writers trip over, right up there with “show, […]
If you’re new to Bookfox, this post is a good place to start. It talks about the big picture decisions every writer needs to make, rather than the tactical decisions I talk about in most other posts. Basically, you need a giant, overarching plan for your writing life. When you start a business, you need […]
Every writer needs to learn dialogue from the great writers preceding them. This post isn’t about how to punctuate dialogue, or the basics of how to write dialogue, but more advanced techniques, as shown by established authors. It doesn’t matter what genre you write: every writer needs to improve their dialogue. And whether you’re writing […]
Nothing ruins a story faster than bad dialogue. Good dialogue, on the other hand, can be tricky to write. It takes more than putting the quotation marks in the right place and adding some dialogue tags. But Bookfox is here to help. In this post, we cover all the tips, tricks, and secrets you need […]
Writing a novel can feel like staring into the void. When you’re sitting in front of a blank page, anything could happen, and that feeling is both freeing… and terrifying. This is where a good story structure comes in. As it turns out, experts say that limitless possibility might not actually be the best for […]
The query letter has one job–to get the agent (or the publisher, if you’re going that route) to read the pages you sent. This means it doesn’t necessarily have to be brilliant, it just has to work. How to write a query letter that works? There are eight parts of a query letter: hook pitch […]
You build a character by separating them from the mass of humanity. Making them an individual, rather than a face in the crowd, is the main challenge of writers. A mannerism is one of the best ways to make a character memorable. Just a single unusual or curious affectation can make them stick in the […]
