What to Do If You Hate Your Novel — A Guest Post

by Jessica Flory It happens to everyone. You’re slogging away, page after page, filling the blank space. And then you start to wonder… Is this even worth it? Finish, No Matter What If you have published several times, you may have the right instincts to know if the story is just not working. Then you […]

Are You the One-Out-of-Ten?

Please don’t get too excited by those odds. I’m not implying that one-out-of-ten writers will one day publish a novel or sell a screenplay, or will write one what will become another of those unlikely self-published success stories. Nor am I implying that one-out-of-ten manuscripts are even salable.  No, that particular statistic is more like one […]

‘Story Physics’ Launched, Kindle and Paperback

As some of you are aware, Amazon.com released the paperback two weeks ago, a good thing.  But the Kindle version hasn’t been available until now, which confused and frustrated some readers. One was so pissed off she posted a 3-star review (out of 5) on the book.  Without reading it.  My response to that: WTF? […]

A Clearer Understanding of ‘Concept’

Idea… concept… premise… story… structure… theme… this is what writing guru James Frye means when he talks about writers bleeding profusely from the forehead. “Man of Steel” opened this week, to good-but-not-particularly great reviews. A technical marvel, absolutely.  It’s directed by the guy who did “300” (Zack Snyder), and you’ll see the same visual magic […]

The Secret Weapon of Story Physics: Narrative Strategy

A story is always the sum of – the outcome of – a huge pile of author decisions: where to start, how long, how soon, how to end it, where to end it, what not to end, how much, how little, when to show this, when to say that… … all of it, hopefully, arriving […]

It’s My Blog and I’ll Cry If I Want To

NOTE: this is the rare Storyfix post that isn’t directly about telling stories. This is about dreams and memories and goals and regret and what we do with it all, which you can easily spin into a perspective on the writing life. Or just life itself.  I do, on both counts. A long, long time […]

So what are “Story Physics,” anyhow?

Just in case you think writing books, or any other book for that matter, is a grand conspiracy between author and editor, with the occasional agent chiming in, consider this: when I was writing “Story Engineering” (my first writing book), I used the term “story physics” several times to describe how and why stories work. […]