Category: story structure
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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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A passion for well-told stories
“Humans are born with a passion for well-told stories.” ― Jessica Brody, Save the Cat Writes a Young Adult Novel Find Save the Cat Writes a Young Adult Novel on Amazon. Photo by Diogo Miranda: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-autumn-leaves-on-a-branch-28543595/ My Linktree
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Can Save the Cat and the Snowflake Method be Used Together? Simultaneously?
I’ve taken most of the summer off from writing blog posts to concentrate on my writing projects. Now summer vacations are over, and school is back in session, I’ve decided to get back into posting. Right click to enlarge. To see step-by-step instructions on using this graphic, click here. A thought occurred to me: as…
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Friday’s Findings: Doing Whatever It Takes
The title of today’s blog entry refers to an update on my writing progress. I’ve been stuck for several weeks. I’ve been having trouble finishing even one scene. I decided to take action. In my science fiction novel, my characters spend about twenty scenes on a planet called Zonvillon. I had already written a couple…
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Friday’s Findings
Prologues vs. Flashbacks Backstory is something I’ve been thinking about lately and this article answered a lot of questions. How to Read Like a Writer (to become a better writer) Five simple steps to reading a book and noticing techniques writers use to make readers want to finish the book. 5 Ways to Write Better…
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Friday’s Findings: July 2022 Camp NaNoWriMo Update #4
Working on more than one WIP at once Well, Camp NaNoWriMo will be over Sunday night. So far, I’ve written 25,7000 words out of my 25,000 goal. But one of my less tangible goals was to successfully navigate three WIPs simultaneously. I’ve definitely learned some things about writing three WIP at once. Good things. For…
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Friday’s Findings: Doing a Scene Audit
I’ve been on vacation this week and while I haven’t gotten as much reading done as I would have liked, I have gotten a LOT done on my novella, Traption. I’ve spent this week going through each scene, one by one and asking myself the following questions: Does this scene have a goal?What are the…
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Friday’s Findings: Fictionary
I bit the bullet and purchased a subscription to Fictionary. Being a word-processing program and outliner for authors, it falls into the same category as Scrivener, but they have some differences. Here’s how I feel about Fictionary: Character tracking: Fictionary has a great feature for keeping track of characters in each scene. Character tracking is…
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Friday’s Findings: The Story on Two Levels
I believe I’ve quoted this fiction writing axiom before, but Terry Pratchett said, “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” With this year’s NaNoWriMo, I’m finding out how true this is. I’m feeling exactly what he was talking about. I spent September and October prepping my story. I made up characters. I…
Andrew M. Friday 