Show. Don’t tell.
Every person who has ever put pen to paper has heard this line. Don’t tell us we are in Paris, give us the acrid scent of the Seine mixing with buttery croissants, give us the crunch of rough, dusty cobblestoned streets beneath our feet, give us the taste of acrylics on the air from freshly painted street art.
I’m a firm believer that the original medium is always the best medium. If a book is turned into a film, there will be something lost in translation, and vice versa. But while it might not always resemble the original story to the letter, I still enjoy many books-turned-films. Here are some of my favorites.
Think about the book you are writing. Think about the book you want to write. Picture it in your mind, the characters, the setting, the themes, the mood. Is it gritty? Is it lush? Is it joyful? Find yourself in that place, that world, surrounded by those characters. Now, answer this question in one sentence.
First of all, congrats! Your interest in doing National Novel Writing Month shows an excitement for writing and storytelling and a willingness to rise to the challenge of writing a whole book in a month!
I haven’t attempted NaNo in three years, but I’ll be doing it with you this year! My NaNo project is the third book in a current series, and I look forward to trying the challenge again, especially after all that I’ve learned as a writer and NaNo-er!
There is no right or wrong way to go about an interview, but I’m going to share some of my favorite techniques for better understanding, empathizing and, eventually, sharing my characters with the world at large.
I may have a little insight into how to reconstruct your book while you are standing in it. Here are a few tips and tricks to starting over from the inside out.
And sometimes, as much as it pains me to admit it, writing doesn’t always take the priority.
My favorite genre is binge reading stories from the library, spending all day in bed swearing I’ll stop after one more chapter, developing massive, unhealthy crushes on fictional characters. My favorite genre is whatever I can get my hands on.
Writing is wonderful. It’s like playing God, sculpting worlds, forming new people from nothing but your fingers against the keyboard, giving life to the two-dimensional creations of your own mind, weaving spells of love and pain and the whole spectrum of human emotion.
I love being a writer, but that’s not why I do it.
For overwriters, word count goals can be very good and they can be very bad.
