How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School For Writers

From the category archives:

Discussions In Class

Time and Time Again and Then Some

May 25, 2010

Week 14 of How to Revise Your Novel tackles the scheduling and duration of scenes. Huh? When a scene happens is important.  Is it bright, hot, summer noontime or black, shivering, winter midnight?  Is your hero sweating as he dodges lunchtime crowds, or risking icy death alone against the moonless snowscape?  And how quickly can [...]

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Why can’t you just call it Murphy and be done with it?

May 21, 2010

Somehow it seems that a hundred thousand words of story aren’t quite as difficult as the few words of bold type that go on the front of the book. Why is that? More importantly, is there a method everyone can use to create a dynamite title?  This discussion offers several different paths to the right [...]

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I’ll see your paperclip, and raise you two curtain rings.

May 17, 2010

Week 3 of How to Revise Your Novel brings up the delight of Scene Cards.  Maybe 50 or 100 of them.  You do not want these little darlings loose on the table when the dogs and kids run through, dragging their contrails behind them.  What to do?  Corral them, round them up, put them in [...]

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Sparkly things, small rocks, bouquets of colored pens for the Muse

May 3, 2010

Clustering, building or adding onto our Sweet Spot Maps, is a powerful tool for the writer. It can also be one more place in which to experience a Thinking Barrier.   Complaints vary from “I get nothing” to “What I got is dumb” and “I don’t understand what I got.” This is where toys can come [...]

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Says who?

April 29, 2010

Which is better, first person or third?  And which character should handle the narration? Sometimes, it depends on how much of the plot the writer wishes to reveal at each point along the way.     Other times, the writer chooses the POV character who has the most to lose, gain, or learn.  Sometimes, the character with [...]

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Keep? Kill? Smoosh? Or sell for parts?

April 20, 2010

Week 12 of HTRYN is a tough one for characters.  The lucky ones get to stay on the island–er–get to stay in the book.  The less fortunate ones get redesigned or smooshed into other characters.  The truly ill-fated ones enter the shadow world of the Never-Used.  Brrrrr. Stop by the discussion on characters, and try [...]

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Does the cat aid the revision process?

April 16, 2010

We are proud and happy to announce a new forum in Holly Lisle’s Writers’ Boot Camps: HTRYN (How To Revise Your Novel) Lite.  This forum is for the grand folks who took Holly’s Crash Revision Course at Savvy Authors (wow, I’m running out of capital letters) and who wanted to continue their writing community.  The [...]

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Go ahead. Make a scene.

April 9, 2010

It’s an old trick to take an employee to lunch in a nice restaurant, feed him some shellfish laced with a subtle yet intriguing sauce,—and tell him he’s not going to be the new vice president in charge of satch-widgets as he was previously promised.  The theory behind this tactic is that the disappointed exec [...]

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But What if You’re Not Making Progress?

April 6, 2010

You want to write, or maybe you want to have written, but you’re not writing.  No, you’re doing everything but writing.  You paint, sing, participate in community activities, organize your closets.  But you don’t write!  What is up with that?  What’s more important, how can you get your writing going again?  Do you need a [...]

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Through Whose Eyes?

March 29, 2010

No doubt about it.  Everything old is new again.  Some of the recent conversations in the Writers’ Boot Camps forums inspired me to fish out an old interchange that makes a lot of interesting and enlightening points.  Which is better–first, close third, omniscient?  Can they be mixed without causing atmospheric anomalies? The Secret Word is [...]

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