Category: scene
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Fast Drafting: Finding Your Balance
Fast Draft: Finding Your Balance
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Writing Strong Description in Fiction, Part 3
A lot of writers feel pressure to “fully visualize” the setting for the reader. So they pile detail upon detail onto the page.
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Writing Strong Description in Fiction, Part 1
When we talk about description in fiction, most writers immediately picture long paragraphs about sunsets, castles, or what color somebody’s curtains are. And honestly? That’s part of why description gets such a bad press sometimes.
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Writing With Scene Beats
If plot is the skeleton and character, is the heart. Beats are the nervous system. They carry every signal, every reaction, every emotional pulse through your story. Master beats—and suddenly everything else gets sharper.
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Writing Advice from Roshani Chokshi
At first, I didn’t realize the newly released fantasy novel, The Swan’s Daughter, had been written by someone I’ve read before: Roshani Chokshi.
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Voices Without Faces: A Dialogue-Only Writing Experiment
I just finished Brandon Sanderson‘s Tailored Realities. It was not what I thought it would be. Yes, I knew it was a collection of short stories, but with surprise me is the inspiration I found through his writing craft observations. My review of Tailored Realities by Brandon Sanderson These nuggets of writing wisdom are found…
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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…
Andrew M. Friday 