Jami Gold's Blog: Jami Gold, Paranormal Author, page 48

Plot Obstacles: Too Easy, Too Difficult, or Just Right?

Many plot events in our story act as obstacles for our characters to overcome.The obstacles might be big or small—or anything in between.

Or maybe they seem small yet have big consequenceslater. For example, a character could get stuck at a railroad crossing and end up late for an interview, costing them the job.

Last week, we talked about how the plot is not our story. We can change plot events around and not necessarily change the main premise of our story.

The plot event holding up our ch...

Writing Feedback: Reaching Our Potential

Today’s post will (hopefully) be short, as I’m working on only 3 hours of sleep after an emotional weekend with my brother and his family. His wife’s mother recently died, and Saturday was the memorial service.

(Yes, my sister-in-law had to deal with her mother’s death right before Mother’s Day. *sigh*)

My sister-in-law is mostly doing okay, and with all of us there to help, the memorial service came together beautifully. The family chose to hold a catered-lunch-and-pass-the-microphone-to-sh...

Self Publishing? What’s Your Plan to Keep Readers? — Part Three

It’s time once again for my monthly guest post over at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. We’ve been exploring the choices for what path we want to follow in our indie publishing career, and today, we’re digging more into how to walk our chosen path.

My series about Indie Publishing Paths at Fiction University has highlighted some of the choices we have to make and given us a few guidelines for figuring out how to make the best decisions for us.

We started off talkingabout knowing our goals....

What’s the Difference between Plot and Story?

When we first start off as writers, if someone asks us about our story, we might launch into an overview of our story’s plot. It’s easy to think the plot is what our story is about.

Believe me, I know. I have several query letter drafts that took that road to rejection. *smile*

Yet one complaint I’ve heard from agents over the years is that many queries are too “plotty.” What does that mean?

With few exceptions, story isn’t the same as plot.

For this post’s image above, the plot event would...

What Goes into Building a Movie in Our Mind?

Thank you to everyone who commented on my post last time about aphantasia,or “mind blindness.” As we discovered, not everyone can create a movie in their mind when writing or reading (which, as Davonne theorized, might explain why some don’t enjoy fiction).

But even for those of us without aphantasia, as writers, we can still struggle to create a well-rounded world or characters that feel real. Or as readers, we might never feel fully immersed in a story to get the whole movie-in-our-mind ef...

Brain Science: How Do You Imagine?

Over the weekend, I posted a link to a really cool article on Facebook that led to an even more interesting discussion. The article is about something called aphantasia.

Aphantasia is the term for when someone can’t imagine something in their mind. As the article’s title alludes to, it’s “mind blindness” or not having a “mind’s eye.”

The author, Blake Ross, says:

“If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and turquoise waves. …You experience this differently, sure. So...

Subtext: Creating Layered Characters

I’ve written many times about how much I love subtext, the stuff that happens between the lines. We often hear that subtext is what’s not said, but that can imply that subtext is limited to dialogue.

In fact, subtext lurks in many aspects of our stories.The messages readers get from our writing aren’t always explicitly stated—in dialogue or otherwise.

We can find implied messages in different story elements, such as:

Genre: Unspoken promisestell readers what they’ll find inside. Theme: Sets...

What Helps You BE a Writer?

The journey to writing is filled with many obstacles. We might struggle with time or self-doubt or needing to learn writing craft. No matter how we look at it, the path to writing success is not smooth.

Yet something keeps us going. Something gives us the inspiration or the motivation to travel up that learning curve. Something helps us past that self-doubt. And something forces us to prioritize writing time (sometimes to the detriment of other aspects of our life).

This past weekend, Delila...

Want to Evoke Emotions in Readers? — Guest: Marcy Kennedy

I’ve often mentioned that one of the last big skills I learned as a writer was how to include emotions. That’s one reason I’ve been such a big fan of the Emotion Thesaurus.If that book had existed when I first started writing, my learning curve would have been several months shorter.

However, while Angela and Becca’s book (and their One Stop for Writers site) is great for giving us the vocabulary we need to describe our characters’ emotions, it’s also important for us to know the bigger pict...

Writing Building Blocks: Paragraph Breaks & Voice

One reason I leave comments open on most of my old posts is because writing advice doesn’t usually expire. The specifics of “how to write deep point of view?” won’t change next year, and editing tips can give us new ideas no matter what stage of learning we’re in.

Because the advice remains valid, any questions that readers come up with remain timely as well. I’m not going to not answer a question from a writer just because they discovered a post long after I wrote it.

A nice bonus of leavin...