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! […]
Smell is the best sense to use in your writing. Yes: it’s better than sound, better than sight, better than touch. There’s something about smell that bypasses all of the normal roadblocks in our brain and goes straight to memory and animal instincts. It’s primitive. It’s elemental. If you want to really immerse a reader […]
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 […]
Articles about sex scenes in books usually fail in one of 3 ways. They often: The sex scenes below are literary fiction. But don’t run away! They’re really good sex and really good writing, and yes, those things can be combined. I’ll prove it to you. Just read the first couple of excerpts below and […]
A key part of writing a novel is figuring out the structure of your story. However, this structure might actually only be one layer of your novel. Complex plots often contain multiple layers of story. A shorter story contained inside a longer story or novel is called a story-within-a-story, an embedded story, or a nested […]
One of the greatest strengths of novels is their ability to include the voices of a wide cast of characters. However, if these characters speak different languages from the one you are writing in, you end up with a dilemma: How do you handle other languages within your fiction? When writing multi-lingual scenes, you have […]
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 […]
