What is the definition of a short story? I define a short story as a brief, focused fictional piece that contains at minimum the following key elements: plot, setting, characterization and some sort of resolution. How long should a short story be? In my opinion, the optimal length for a short story is between ten
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When you begin adding and revising scenes for your novel, the process is a little different than writing a first draft. Your goals are different because at this point, you are filling in missing information and working within the constraints of what already exists. Your characters, tone and plot have already been set, and you
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At this point, you are ready to perform a comprehensive reevaluation of your novel. Until now, the draft of your novel has been too rough for clear evaluation. Distractions such as grammar, spelling and chronology make it difficult to honestly evaluate your work. If you’ve been following the steps, you should have a relatively clean
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What is an information guide? An information guide is a much like a style guide. A style guide is a set of rules and guidelines for a publication. Typical style guides focus on issues such as grammar, usage, spelling and capitalization. When creating a guide for a novel, however, there many additional things to keep
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It is time to revisit the novel editing process we began in December. The first three steps in the novel editing process were: Read What You’ve Written The Light Edit Creating a Chronology Once you have accomplished these three things, you can now begin the editing process in earnest. This is the more traditional approach
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I’ve got 50,000 words! What do I do with them??? I reached my 50,000 word count in NaNoWriMo and I’m proud of it. Writing 50,000 words about anything in a single month is quite an accomplishment. My schedule was packed, so I didn’t have as many hours to work on it as I would have
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This is Day 9 of 10 Days of Character Building Basing characters on actual people is a fairly common literary practice. The people around you can be a great source of inspiration. I don’t, however, recommend basing a character on a single person. It can be problematic for the following reasons: If that person finds
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This is Day 7 of 10 Days of Character Building This character building idea turns the concept of the interview around. Instead of interviewing a character about themselves, you interview the other characters in your story about one particular character. This gives you a profile of the character as seen by other people. It can
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This is Day 21 of 30 Poems in 30 Days On the Move Poetry, unlike prose, is not reliant on plot. While it is possible to create a poem with a plot, a plot is by no means a requirement for a successful poem. It is merely one option out of many. Progression, however, occurs
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Do you want to write a novel? Most people try to write a good novel and fail. Dare to be different. Try writing a bad novel instead. If you finish, you will have either succeeded in writing a bad novel or failed and written a good novel. It’s a win/win situation. Here’s a guide to
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