Suspense! (And How To Build It)

One of the mystery genre’s best techniques can help your story keep readers turning pages. Here’s how.

Every Story Is A Whodunit

Did you know there’s a single genre with the techniques to unlock all the others?

The Key To Emotional Engagement: High Personal Stakes

Are your characters tugging your readers’ heartstrings? Here’s how to make sure they do.

Breaking The Blocks: Satire

This is going to be a relatively quick post, because it’s a follow-up to last week’s post; different enough to be its own thing, but closely related enough that it can follow its immediate predecessor. Last week, I told you about a linguistic “stretching exercise” designed to break you out of the stifling rigidity of conventional thought. This week, I

Breaking The Blocks: Order From Chaos

Introduction That might look a little comical; almost certainly it looks quite strange. “Quantum Tosspot”?! What the hell does that mean?! That’s the point. Sorry, I feel like I just talked around a corner and left people scratching their heads. Let me explain. One Origin Of Writer’s Block We’re all familiar with writer’s block, so there’s no need to rehash

Plotting (For Pantsers)

Plotting (For Pantsers) Introduction There are, I have discovered, two kinds of writers — plotters and pantsers. Plotters work out their entire story in advance, knowing exactly what must happen, exactly where, and when, and to whom, and exactly what those characters have to do about it in order to advance the story. Then there are “pantsers” — the word

Path Finder 7: How To Use Dual-Pane Mode (And Why You Probably Don’t Need To.)

Introduction: This morning, I found a question in the comments of my last screencast about Path Finder: Richard Chimelis said, “Your video shows dual sidebars in PF7. How did you accomplish that? Everything I can find says that Cocoatech hasn’t enabled that capability yet. Please share — I too was a TotalFinder user since its inception and I need dual

Even Heroes Crap: The Immersive Power Of The Mundane

Introduction Do you know what the biggest problem is with most high-concept fiction? Fantasy, science fiction, horror? Nobody poops. So why is that a problem? Because the more exotic your premise, the more grounding it needs in the “real world”,  the less believable it is except through your characters. And only ordinary people can make the extraordinary ring true. When is the right time for

The Interview: Discovering Your Character From The Outside In

The Interview: Discovering Your Characters From The Outside In Introduction: One of the things I occasionally find myself struggling with, as a writer, is characterization. Making characters distinctive can be enhanced through a few tricks — for example, dialogue idiosyncrasies — but those are only enhancements. Characters have to be fundamentally different people if they are to be believable, much less relatable.

Perfectly Villainous: The Importance Of The Well-Rounded Antagonist

Introduction Every writer, I suspect, knows that among your most important characters is the Protagonist. The problem that many writers face when beginning to learn storycraft, however, is that while the Protagonist is perhaps your most important character narratively — after all, the reader will spend most of his or her time following the Protagonist closely — the second most