Category: scene
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Friday’s Findings: Create a Scene Palette
Most writers want their scenes to flow effortlessly on the page, but few scenes actually begin that way. Before the smooth prose and clean structure comes something messier, more playful, and far more effective: scene brainstorming.
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Test Your Novel’s Potential
“Is my novel idea worth pursuing?” How can you know you will fall in love with your novel without spending hours of writing, stringing together thousands of words, and creating dozens of scenes before realizing it doesn’t work? Try this: Jessica Brody, author of Save the Cat Writes a Novel, recommends just writing the single…
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Friday’s Findings: Ways to Start a Writing Session
In my last blog posting, I talked about using copy work to get started for a writing session. The concept goes like this: for five minutes, copy word-for-word, a few paragraphs of your favorite author or novel. Then start your actual work-in-progress (WIP). It made me realize copy work is just one way to warm…
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Friday’s Findings: Starting a Writing Session
Use This Simple Technique to Get in the Mood for Your Writing Session A few years ago, I wrote about different ways to practice writing exercises. These exercises are designed to help improve my narrative style and writing craft, and they’re distinct from actually writing the story or scene I’m currently working on. Instead, these…
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Friday’s Findings: Audio Annotations
“The point of being a god is to have the joint running to your specifications.” -Guy Vesten, The Hungry Gods by Adrian Tchaikovsky This is just one of several quotes I got from the novella I listened to today, Tchaikovsky’s The Hungry Gods (THG). It wasn’t very long – only five hours – and I…
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Friday’s Findings: Should You Add a Prologue?
Five years ago, I did a series called Writing Style Outcasts. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about one of these misfits of grammar. I’ve discovered the question is not why shouldn’t I use them but is when to use them. I’d like to add prologues to these misfits of the writing craft. A…
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Friday’s Findings: Using Scrivener’s Snapshot Function to Revise
There are a million ways to revise. And there are a million ways to use Scrivener. For my fiction writing, Scrivener offers flexibility and customization. I have found it malleable to fit whatever writing project I am working on at the time. If you haven’t used it, you would too, I bet. No, I’m not…
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Friday’s Findings: The 555 Experiment
When I did my own NaNoWriMo last month, I realized something: writing 1,666 words a day isn’t sustainable for me. I work a full-time job, and I’m not as fortunate as someone with a flexible schedule or who doesn’t have to work full-time. For people in those situations who wish to write, I truly wish…
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My 50k Novel in 30 Days: Final Daze
During my last three days of doing this unofficial NaNoWriMo, I wondered about my writing craft process for the future… Day 28 It is a sad day for me. The website for NaNoWriMo has vanished. Ironic it happened while I’m in the last week of one of the best 50k words in 30 days I’ve ever done.…
Andrew M. Friday 