Kristen Elise's Blog - Posts Tagged "plot"

My protagonist was racing through Egypt faster than I could type, her quest to find her husband’s killer preceding my own quest to put her latest predicament on paper before I could forget what I had in mind. The clock was ticking. Katrina had every reason to suspect that someone was hot on her trail, and that the best-case scenario was that it was Middle Eastern law enforcement. I was in the zone.

Then my editor read the section and totally deflated my ego. “Why doesn’t she just Google herself?” she asked.

D'OH!

The Internet age has created new hurdles for the author of mysteries and thrillers. What is left to investigate, when everything you need to know is right at your fingertips? Instead of action-packed, unpredictable adventures, our heroes have smart phones. Which can make for the most un-thrilling thriller ever written.

Here I offer a collection of ideas for neutralizing the digital age, or even using it to up the stakes in your story:

More at http://deniseweeks.blogspot.com/2013/...

So you know that the main character is the protagonist and his or her nemesis is the antagonist. Do you know what the second main character is called? Most of us refer to this person as the sidekick, but it turns out, he/she is technically referred to as the deuteragonist (I had to look this up, I don't know about you.) More importantly, in a first-person novel, it's easy for this character to come across as one-dimensional.

Here we continue our discussion of the first-person novel.

I have learned that in first-person, it's easy for the story to become more of a mystery and less of a thriller. The reader is seeking resolution to a dilemna alongside a single character and thus lacks the total picture of what is happening overall in the story. If done well, this can still be thrilling, and the mystery can add to your story.

More at http://www.murderlab.com/2013/09/the-...

OK. So Fifty Shades of Grey sold fifteen gazillion copies. I get it. Sex sells, and we have known this ever since the first sexually reproducing hermaphroditic flatworms evolved out of an amoeba's binary fission gone wrong. But please understand something, dear reader (by which I actually mean, dear writer.) The fact that sex sells does NOT mean that writing porn is going to make you E.L. James. It won't, indeed.

To put a little bit of perspective on this "new" trend of writing porn disguised as literature, let's take a moment to review the evolution of porn.

In the beginning, there was Ron Jeremy....

Read the complete post at http://www.murderlab.com/2013/12/most...