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.
While science fiction is often set in the future, historical fiction is set in the distant past.
Just like sci-fi, historical fiction authors must develop genre-specific techniques to create stories set in a different time period.
I love podcasts for writers.
Why? Because I can learn about my favorite author’s writing process while I’m folding towels, and get great advice about creating characters while commuting.
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.
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.
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, don’t tell.”
There is a certain magic in a well written ending. It must be both satisfying and surprising, unexpected and also perfectly fitting.
But where do you stop? Which sentences are the last sentences?
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.
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.
Literary devices aren’t something you learn in English class and then forget about for the rest of your life.
They’re a beating, thumping heart of the fiction writer’s toolbox.