Five reasons why Scrivener is great for Nanowrimo and beyond.
Category: Craft
How to Write a Satisfying Cliffhanger
Examples of how to write a cliffhanger (and how not to) from Mary Pearson’s latest books.
You can learn a lot from writing one short story
What happens when a perfectionist takes the advice to write more short stories.
How learning story structure helps me write faster
I last participated in NaNoWriMo in 2010. Since then, I’ve had two kids, quit my job, and rewritten my novel twice. Along the way, I picked up quite a bit about story structure and am now a reformed pantser (although no one is ever only a plotter or a pantser, many lean far to one…
How to Format Your Manuscript, Part 2
Level 2: Jedi So the last post told you about font formatting and headers/page numbers. This post takes you to the next level of convenience—because that’s really what this is about. When you use the techniques Microsoft Word is expecting, you can get the application to work with you instead of feeling like you’re working…
Getting readers hooked (and stringing them along)
Trying to unstick myself while drafting my current work-in-progress, I was drawing a timeline of my story (an adaptation of the idea in this post). My main plot is a question that’s (hopefully) raised in the reader’s mind on almost the first page and that doesn’t get resolved until almost the last page—the main dramatic…
Faze vs. Phase
The noun phase most commonly means “a stage in a process of change or development” (a phase of the moon, a kid going through a phase) or “a state of matter” (e.g., a phase change of water is going from liquid to gas). Its verb form is less common but means “to carry out in…
Confessions of an Inveterate Pantser
Or, “How I learned to stop bumbling and love the outline.” On the spectrum from “write by the seat of your pants and see where it goes” [whence “pantser”] to “plan every scene before you write a first draft” [“plotter”], I’m naturally a lot closer to the former. I like to wait for inspiration and…
Tenet or Tenant? Grammar help you can remember!
A basic tenet of owning a rental: Your tenant quality is fundamental! Bonus! I’ll give you pictures. Tenet: a belief (not necessarily religious) or principle Tenant: someone who rents a space Tennant: To me, always the Tenth Doctor Okay, yes, I was basically just looking for an excuse to have a Tenth Doctor picture.
Affect vs. Effect: Grammar Help You Can Remember
These two words, affect and effect, cause a great deal of consternation in English, no doubt because they sound similar and each can be either a noun or a verb. The quickest rule of thumb is that, in most cases, you affect something (verb) and cause an effect (noun). Side note: the noun affect is…