Personally, I like fitting endings even more than happy ones. Sure, it's nice to know that the characters you've read about succeed. When you've invested time and emotional energy, you enjoy it when they make it out of their troubles and gain the victory they've sought for so long, but I don't like false endings. … Continue reading How to Write an Ending that Fits Your Story
Tag: The Lord of the Rings
Recently, I was explaining the concept of an inciting moment to my five-year-old (he's a bit young, but one might as well start early, right?), and it got me thinking about how critical the concept is. Some writers may call it an inciting incident, and others have probably never heard of it, including the idea … Continue reading Inciting Moment–What It Is and Why You Should Care
Okay, perhaps it's more of a tool than a trick, but journalists have been using the "Who-What-Where-When-Why-and-How" format on hard news pieces for well over a century (to judge by the sort of articles they write, where each of these items are addressed), and I've found the six questions are equally useful when writing a … Continue reading Focusing Your Novel with A Journalist’s Trick
For most authors, this may sound like a silly question. If they're Christian, then of course they're featuring the God of the Bible, the Father who sent His Son into the world. There is only one God they could possible feature in their writing...right? Well, not exactly. I just read three different novels that I … Continue reading What Kind of God is in Your Christian Fiction?
Book Description per Back of Book: Earia, queen of the elves, has long fought against an enemy she believed she created: a man, Niren, who she raised as her son, over four hundred years ago and he will see every man, elf, and dwarf killed unless they bend a knee to him. The dragons already … Continue reading Book Review: What Time Handed Them
As we discussed yesterday, your climax (and your novel in general) needs conflict of some kind to make the story go. But how do you go about creating this conflict, or drama? There are two kinds of drama in a story. The primary drama, which consists of the main character fighting whatever the antagonist is: … Continue reading #Drama: Make It, Don’t Fake It #atozchallenge
I think the biggest thing that makes readers keep reading is.... Mystery. No, it doesn't mean you have to write a "who-done-it," but the best novels start out with a "Big Question" that the rest of the novel must answer. Here are a few examples: Pride and Prejudice: Can Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters make "good … Continue reading Your Novel’s “Big Question”
Recently, I read Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf, his original folk-tale version of the story, “Sallic Spell,” and The Rood and the Torc, a historical fiction novel set in the same culture as Beowulf (though later in history). All this made me realize how Tolkien imported massive quantities of material from Beowulf and the Danish/early Anglo-Saxon … Continue reading Tolkien, Beowulf, and Borrowing
There has been a great deal written about how authors should be “brutal” to their characters and kill them off, whenever the plot requires it, just to keep readers from feeling a character is “safe.” And then, when it happens, there is the inevitable outcry that it was a horrible ending, leaving some readers inconsolable … Continue reading Authorial Brutality: Considerations on Killing off Characters
One of the blogs I follow recently did a Bookshelf Tag (in her case, it was a Movie Shelf Tag), and it got me thinking about the power of stories and books, in particular. I discovered that the books that inspire me aren’t usually the ones that introduced me to a genre, while the ones … Continue reading Inspiration, Introduction, and Influence: The Power of Books
Andrea Lundgren 