An Interview with NY Times Bestselling Author Chelsea Cain

Be afraid.  Be very afraid. Chelsea Cain is one scary writer.  And one very cool lady.  And perhaps those two attributes help describe her success… in the first three of her first fourbestselling novels (Heartsick… Sweetheart… Evil at Heart, the fourth being The Night Season), she brought us the sinister Gretchen Lowell, the most beautiful and sadistic […]

Five More Mistakes That Will Expose You As a Rookie

Last week we looked at five common mistakes made by writers at all levels, but perhaps most commonly by newer writers. The terms “newer” and “rookie” make me nervous, because they may be interpreted as “less than.”  Not my intention, because it’s not true: experience doesn’t always equate to quality or knowledge, and very often […]

The Ins and Outs of a Sexy Book Cover

No pun intended.  Promise. If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been busy re-publishing my previously released novels from Penguin-Putnam (via Onyx and Signet paperback imprints). as ebooks.  They tossed the rights under the bus with me, and I’m happily taking them forward into the brave new world of digital publishing to see what happens. […]

5 Creative Flaws That Will Expose Your Lack of Storytelling Experience

There are a million ways to cripple a story.  Here are five of them.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being inexperienced (we’ve all been there).  Unless it shows up in your story in a way that detracts from it. Or kills it. Pop quiz: which is the more unforgiving audience: agents, editors, or readers? Used […]

“The Help” — A Guest Post About Subtext

Please welcome Donna Lodge, who contributes this challenging and rewarding take on the value and use of subtext in our stories. I recently finished reading Linda Seger’s book, “Writing Subtext: What Lies Beneath.” It’s a good res0urce, devoted to a often neglected aspect of our craft. Seger discusses how to find subtext, how to write it […]

Ten Reasons You Might Really Like the Best Novel I Ever Wrote

(APOLOGIES for the mis-directed links in the prior edition of this post.  Should be fixed now.  Thanks for your patience. L.)    No, I’m not Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote a bestseller by the same name.  While we are often confused, we look nothing alike and quickly return each other’s mail. My fourth novel, “Bait and […]

“The Help” – A Happy Ending… ?

Great endings are hard to craft. Fun to read… easy to take for granted when we do.  Unless it bombs. My favorite author, Nelson Demille, totally tanked the ending of “Night Fall” when he concluded the story with a deus ex machina of preposterous proportions.  After hundreds of pages of rooting for the hero as […]

Sunday Side Notes

Just possibly the worst SEO headline in the history of blogging. But that’s what I have for you today. A couple of side note ditties. Meanwhile, I hope you’ll help yourself to the ongoing series on “The Help,” which should wrap this week. Meanwhile.. The Small World of Writers Early on – June 19, 2009, […]

“The Help”: Recognizing the Screaming Power of Narrative Sub-Text

We all know what sub-plot means.  It’s what’s going on in a story that isn’t – yet – directly connected to, or dependent upon, the main plotline. Like a guy getting newly married to a younger woman who gets kidnapped by his not-so-young ex-wife.  Escaping the kidnapping is the primary dramatic plotline.  The evolution of his pending marriage […]

“The Help” — Seeing the Structure in Living Color. Literally.

By Shane Arthur of Writing Prompts I could write until I’m blue in the face (dressed in black while wearing cool sunglasses) about how the principles of story engineering have helped me see books and storytelling like Neo sees zeros and ones in the movie The Matrix.  My previous Storyfix guest post attests to this eye-opening analogy. […]