Guest Post by Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer Illustration by Paul King (Choctaw) How can you write about Native Americans without offending someone, or totally botching the culture? As a Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma tribal member and a full-time author, I have a unique understanding and empathy for authors who attempt to write about Native Americans. In […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
Everyone tells you to write scenes. To show, not tell. But what if that was … bad advice? Or at least limiting advice, because virtually every great book in history uses summary and “telling” in at least a few places in the book. And surprisingly, some books use summary for MOST of the book. And […]
When one of your characters is on drugs, you want to accurately portray the thoughts, actions, and speech of what someone would say on such a drug. But some of you might not want to take Ecstasy or Cocaine or Toad Venom in the course of your casual “writing research.” This post will rescue you! […]
It’s easy to hate dream sequences in a novel. I mean, how many bad dreams sequences have you read? I’ve read a ton, and that’s why for so long I was resistant to teach other writers how to use dreams, and refused to use them in my fiction. But after continuing to see dreams in […]
Stories are chronological. One event happens after another. However, this does not mean that stories have to be told chronologically. Engaging novels often contain scenes which are presented in a different order than they occur in time. Plots using this technique are called non-chronological or non-linear. Sometimes they are described as disjointed or fractured narratives. […]
