There’s nothing fancy about a list. Lists are the vanilla flavor of fiction, the most basic tool the writer can have in their toolbox. It’s the simplest way to organize information — no fancy frills, no tricks, no complexity. What you see is what you get. 1, 2, 3. A, B, C. Yet in its […]
I’ve seen a lot of beta reading questions around the internet, and they’re mostly bad. You don’t want to give the same set of questions to every beta reader. It’s best if you hand-select questions for each reader based on what you know about them. For instance, the questions you want to ask a casual […]
It’s incredibly difficult to find beta readers. It’s almost easier to find an editor, because the relationship is transactional. Money = reading + advice. But with a beta reader, you’re asking someone to commit 5 – 10 hours of their life to your brain and story. For free. That’s a huge commitment, and you have […]
I learned about Tertulia, the book recommendation app, from the New York Times article. So I decided to try it out. When I downloaded the app, it said there was a waiting list (uh, oh). But when I signed up, I immediately got an invite (although it went to my spam folder, so I didn’t […]
So you’re thinking about self publishing your children’s book, but you’re a little worried about how much it will cost you. That’s totally understandable. You don’t want to get too deep into the process and then realize that you can’t afford to finish. What I’ll do in this post is lay out the average costs […]
A great metaphor will have distance between the metaphor and the original object. It’s very important that they’re unlike. The more different your metaphors are from the thing described, the more surprising they will be, and the more they will help your reader to understand. Metaphor Mistakes Highly similar metaphors. For instance, “a pool in […]
1. Present Tense This is the default tense of nearly all beginning writers. The trouble is that few established authors use it. It’s more of an exception than the rule. So when you write your book in present tense, it’s like you’re marking it with a giant stamp that screams to every agent, publishers, and […]
There are many posts about how to title your book. Even Bookfox has one. But not as many writers concentrate on how to discuss the book title inside the book. It’s a powerful moment when the reader finally encounters the title of the book inside the pages of the story, and yet we don’t talk […]
One of the best ways to learn how to write is to learn by imitation. So if you want to write a fight scene, you should look at writers who have come before you. Below are a variety of fight scenes: some just with fists, some with weapons like swords, spears, and knives. All of […]
It’s time to write a big fight scene in your novel, but you don’t want to botch it. That’s understandable. I’ve read enough badly written fight scenes to know that it’s truly easy to write a boring, predictable fight scene with nothing at stake, where the reader doesn’t even care who wins by the end. […]
