Laurel Garver's Blog, page 17

Top Blogging Topics for Writers

Do you struggle to come up with ideas for your blog, writer friends? Well, never fear, I have a handy list to stimulate your thinking about awesome topics sure to draw a big audience, post after post.

Photo credit: jppi from morguefile.comMake your romance swoonier with these pretty names for human excretionsHow vowels are destroying your proseFantastik! Using product placement to make your fiction more lucrativeInspiring stories from the great nose pickers of literary historyHow to write a no...

Anatomy of a book: parts and their purposes

How well do you know the parts of a book and their names and functions? Below I've gathered a list of the most common elements in a printed book.

Photo credit: pschubert from morguefile.comFront Matter
All the pages prior to the main body. Numbering is done in lowercase Roman numerals.

End papers/leaves
Blank pages, sometimes with images, at the beginning and end of a book. They usually exist to fill out a printer's signature (huge paper sheets from which book pages are cut) and gi...

Teen me: a St. Patrick's Day reminiscence

Dublin photo by flokke from morguefile.comJust for fun, I thought I'd post an entry from one of my high school journals describing my experiences marching in the St. Patrick's day parade in Dublin, Ireland, with my high school band thirty years ago today.  I haven't altered the words I wrote at 16, except to remove names. Read on to learn about the magic of magpies, dueling saxophones and how to preform emergency surgery on a parade route.

March 17, 1985

Happy St. Patrick’s...

The door to great telling details: your character's fridge

Jane opens Brenna’s fridge and sees neat rows of French mineral water, bins stuffed with fresh veggies, and hiding behind a row of organic condiments, a half-eaten shoo-fly pie.

Who is Brenna?
A) A Southern grandma who runs Jane’s quilting circle.
B) An upwardly-mobile, urban gym-addict who’s ashamed of her rural roots.
C) A disorganized, free-spirited artist who rarely remembers to eat.

image from blog.zealousgood.com
If you guessed B, then you know that what’s in a character’s fridge tells you a...

Are you letting your imagination starve?

I know loads of writers who pore over every writing craft book they can get their hands on, but who nonetheless can't seem to get a story off the ground. Why is that?
They neglect an essential element of craft rarely gets talked about: developing your knowledge base so that you have raw material from which to build interesting stories. This is also called "research."
Research has become something of a dirty word among a certain breed of fiction writer. These folks consistently argue that they w...

Have a perplexing story problem? Four tips for accessing solutions

Some ideas need to be coaxed out of your brain.Every once in a while when I'm drafting a brand new scene, whether it's in the rough drafting process or in revision, to replace material or fill in an obvious hole, I hit a spot where I know roughly what needs to happen, but I don't yet know HOW to present it.

I typically leave a note to myself that's something like this:

[She overhears David and Sarah discussing their relationship]

Side note: Square brackets are useful for these notes-to-self, bec...

Blogging like it's 2009

I admit I shamelessly stole this post title from YA author Sara Zarr. (Though, to be fair, she used the year 2006.) In a recent post, she discussed the gradual shift in her blogging style away from personal posts to podcasts, largely interviews with other authors about creative life.

That's astonishingly brilliant! I'd tell her so if  I had hands.What struck me about her post was this: "I’m leaving comments off because I really do think that part of blogging is dead (or nearly dead, or at...

Need to raise more questions in your fiction? Try starbursting

Journalists are trained to always ask six core questions when developing a news story: Who? What? Where? When? Why?  How? The corporate world has a clever way of visualizing them: on a six-pointed star. For corporations, the center of the star would list a new product or service, and executives would use the “starburst” to develop key questions to help them think through the practicalities of creating it: Who needs it? What do they want from it? Where do customers ask for this kind of th...

8 Tips for Writing Standout Titles

Kimberly Joy Peters, 2010; School Library JournalTitles are tricky, no doubt about it. Your title, like your cover art, is an important marketing tool. A good title should communicate in such a way that it appeals to your core audience.

Here are a few things I've gleaned, largely from my experience as a reader.

Intrigue by raising questionsTitles that spark curiosity because they raise a question are often very effective. Consider these examples

Chaim Potok's The Chosen: Why is this person...

Who are you really? 52 questions to go deeper with characters

Photo credit: GaborfromHungary from morguefile.comCharacters ought to be more than a name and job title, like Joan Bunderson, special operative or Kyle Kowalski, hockey star. To breathe on the page, your characters need to have an outer life that's relational beyond work and an inner life of passions, drives, attitudes, memories, wounds, and fears.

Below is a fairly exhaustive list of questions to brainstorm when developing a new character, especially the protagonist. Obviously...