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.
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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.
You can have relatable, complex characters and a compelling plot, but if your dialogue feels forced or clunky, your readers won’t make it far enough to care.
The truth is: nothing ruins a manuscript faster than bad dialogue.
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.
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: