Construction

(Under Construction – more content coming soon! I’m only one woman you know.)

Every story – good and bad – starts with a “What if” idea. So what’s yours, how can you tell if it’s any good, and how can you build a story off that?
A good “What if” idea is great, but you gotta get the words on the page, babe, or your idea doesn’t mean squat. Check out this section on how to start actually WRITING a book.

What You Absolutely Need To Know Before You Start Writing

Ah sweet Jughead – bearer of the dumbest hat and stupidest name in all of Riverdale – will you ever finish your terribly pretentious book so the world may finally understand your misunderstood genius??

In my last article, I discussed how authors often fall into the trap of obsessing over irrelevant character details at the expense of info that matters. You don’t need to know everything about a character, only certain critical details: desires, strengths, and weaknesses. The same holds true for starting a story: you don’t need to know everything, only certain things…but you NEED to know those key things…[keep reading]

Ending is easier than beginning, but hard to do well. Stick the landing with these tips!
If you don’t even know what this means, you’ve got some reading (below) to do!
Just like a movie or TV show, every novel is composed of scenes where stuff happens (mostly). Want me to get more specific? …Okay!

How To Write A Good Fight/Sex Scene

“Ladies, did you know I’m also a billionaire? It’s true! Sure, I inherited my billions from my father, who started with millions he inherited from his father and so on for several generations, but thanks to our system of tax breaks for the rich and rampant wealth distribution inequality, I grew those millions into billions. Have you seen my washboard abs? I mean, REALLY seen them?”

Let’s be honest—the vast majority of fight/sex scenes in Hollywood and literature only exist to titillate. Most could be replaced by a sign or sentence that says “And then they have sex,” or “And then they fight.” I lump sex scenes and fight scenes together because the mechanics and purposes of both are very similar…[keep reading]

We Need To Talk About The Darkest Minds and the Importance of Choice

Subtitle: How Not to Tell a Good Story

You may have blinked and missed it, but The Darkest Minds movie released in August 2018 is one of the most recent Young Adult (YA) dystopia joints adapted from a popular novel to crash and burn at the box office.

Cue the proclamations from on-high that the YA dystopia genre is dead. DEEEEAAAAD!!

But it’s unfair to blame an entire genre for the failure of an individual movie. While the Han Solo movie also performed below expectations nobody declared science fiction dead, or that thrillers were dead when The Snowman garnered scathing reviews. The Darkest Minds didn’t fail because audiences don’t want YA dystopias, but because it was a bad movie that flunked the basics of Storytelling 101…[keep reading]

Unless you’re Stephen King or a romance author, it’s probably gonna take you a LONG time to write your book. There’s just no way around it when you’ve got to squeeze 60-90K words out of your head. Find out some tried and true methods on how to do it here.

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A How-To Writing Website for My Mom – and You