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January 5 - November 2, 2021
Always carefully revise your use of tense before submitting a manuscript.
Unless a character is teetering on the brink of insanity, his reactions to events should be proportional to those events.
Generally, emotions should be shown indirectly, through some combination of thoughts, stage directions, and descriptions of physical sensations.
Unless the main point of a thing is the character’s experience of it, give us instead the thing itself.
The manuscripts of unpublished authors are often rife with passages in which the protagonist takes stock of his life.
scene. If your character needs to take stock of his personal issues, show him the respect he deserves by giving him his privacy.
The unpublished novelist should remember that his potential readers are people just like the friends and co-workers who didn’t want to hear this stuff in person. This is why published novels tend to begin with action, continue with action, and provide a steady supply of action, through which relevant inner monologue is gracefully threaded.
Give us the thought once. We will assume that the character’s opinion remains the same until you tell us otherwise.
often go on to have the characters explain the problem away by pointing out that because it is real life, it is not subject to criticism…as it would be in a novel. Of course, it is a novel, and nobody is fooled.
If you want to hide something from the reader, you must hide it. It is not a help to have the protagonist repeatedly protest that it’s not there.
It’s perfectly all right for a character to go into a reverie about other times and places if the memory contains important information—and if the present scene does finally take place. If the memory or fantasy entirely supplants the present time, however, readers will wonder why you bothered to take us to a party in the first place if you weren’t going to let us talk to anyone or dance.
the rule of economy
If your characters are eating, the only interaction with food you should report is that which advances the plot or illustrates the mood.
put in hours of painstaking research, whose fruits he will deftly integrate into his story, making it vivid and uncannily real.
Above all, when the author herself finds history boring, her historical novel suffers.
Historical research has the same status as all background information. The author must know it, even if it does not appear directly in the novel. Otherwise, the characters won’t seem like people, and the setting won’t seem like a place.
The problem of anachronism in language is far more difficult to solve than the problem of anachronistic physical objects. You can easily remove an object, but all too often, in trying to keep language true to period, authors end up with something unnatural and stilted.
The only solution to this problem is to study both literature written during the period you’re addressing, and fiction written about the period by contemporary authors whom you trust.
If you are going to write a character with specialized knowledge you yourself do not possess, particularly a character whose chief characteristic is possession of that specialized knowledge, you must take steps to avoid getting that knowledge wrong.
As always, it is a good idea for the author to know more than he shows, so while reading popular material on your subject is a good start, it won’t hurt to dip into more specialized materials so you have more of a feel for the subject.
The most effective kinds of research into social settings are either time spent in those settings or immersion in what historians call primary sources—books, accounts, and documents generated by members of that group.
Confine the fruits of your research to passages in which specialized knowledge is necessary and appropriate.
you have not yet drawn your reader into a world in which that philosophy has a crucial impact on what happens next in the plot.
Your beliefs might be intriguing and enlightening, but if that was what we wanted to read, we’d have been shopping in nonfiction.
when the symbols that trigger that epiphany are too baldly placed in the character’s path for her to trip over, we are not so much satisfied as annoyed.
If you are irresistibly drawn to exploitative material, you are far better off openly celebrating your sleaziness than using your fiction to stage a war between your id and your superego.
Have a character deliver a speech explaining that love conquers all, and our eyes glaze over. We all want to see love triumph, but not even the simplest among us wants a long explication of the idea that love is pretty darn potent.
Unless your genre is porn, any sex act that has no plot significance attached to it should be examined carefully.
Does the sex scene advance the plot or backstory in any way?
Has a sex scene that is almost identical happened before?
A good time not to write a sex scene is when you don’t really want to.
While sex and humor are both very difficult to realize on the page, it is all too easy to realize humor while trying to realize sex.
It’s usually best to err on the side of caution and have your characters laugh only occasionally and modestly. The laughter, most importantly, should not be there to show that the joke was funny (we’ll make up our own minds about that) but to show some kind of bonding between the characters, or that they’re having a good time, etc.
The query letter is a business letter. An agent or an editor who agrees to work with you will want to know that you take a professional attitude to your writing, because it is the way they make their money. You don’t have to be completely impersonal, and there’s nothing wrong with a little humor,
published authors about the possibility that somebody might steal their ideas. This is because published authors know that there is no end of ideas, and what you’re selling is largely in the execution.
As an unknown, unpublished novelist you are like a person applying for an entry-level job at a major corporation.
Writing a novel is a very personal experience, but selling a novel is business.
Relax, take a deep breath, and get back to work. While it is possible to sell genre novels with a few chapters and an outline, first-time novelists are almost always better advised to finish the book first.
we all want to be loved for our true selves, our inner essence, but that doesn’t mean we don’t take a shower and look in the mirror before we go out on a date.
Chapter One is not convincing, the reader will never see Chapter Seven.
