From Our Blog
Nonlinear Storytelling: How Not To Make A Mess
The beginning is not always the optimal place to start a story. Many authors have found that nonlinear storytelling, with its shifts across time and perspective, can deepen reader engagement and create a more layered narrative experience.
Nonlinear novels do not follow events chronologically. Instead, authors may move forward and backward in time or develop parallel timelines that unfold in con…
Sidekicks & Ensembles: Protecting the Hero and Each Other
If you’re writing a story, you’ll need secondary characters to flesh out the world you’re building. Otherwise, it’s a pretty dull world. You need sidekicks!
Sidekicks are indispensable for asking or answering questions of your heroes. At the very least, they give your main characters someone to interact with.
Are there differences between sidekicks, ensembles, and partners? Do you need them if …
Best Left Unsaid: Mastering Omission, Misdirection, and Precision in Dialogue
We all want to write fast-paced, energy-packed dialogue, but like everything else related to being a novelist, what looks the most effortless from the outside is actually the most challenging.
The magic of sizzling dialogue lies in what’s not said—an invisible tension beneath the words. Omission, misdirection, and precision make otherwise mundane conversations come alive.
The goal is dialogue t…
Prologue at Your Own Risk: When to Use Them and How to Make Them Work
A prologue is an introduction to a literary work that comes before the main narrative of the story. Its purpose is to provide information to the reader that is not readily apparent in the first chapter. Simple, right?
Anyone who has been writing novels for a while can tell you that the debate on prologues is fierce. Many of us writers refuse to include them, while the rest of us adore t…
You can never read the same story twice. Some of us complain about returning to earlier favorites only to find they’ve been rendered unreadable by visits from an imaginary being called “the Suck Fairy.” The Suck Fairy brings to our attention the unfortunate assumptions our favorite authors made as they created their fictional worlds: the racism implicit in Tarzan’s superiority over Black Africa…
The Ins, the Outs, and the Uh-Ohs of a Series: Writing Connected Books
Early in my writing career, I took a lot of world-building workshops. At the time, I was writing contemporary romances set in quirky small towns, so I would carefully build and populate my world. Then, I would turn in the manuscript and start all over again. It took years before I thought, “Wait … what if I stayed in one fictional place and explored more of its stories before moving on?”
Part o…