I haven’t read every craft book out there, but I’ve read a lot of them. Some good, some great, some, well, not so fab. My short list would include anything on writing by James Scott Bell, Story Structure Demystified by Larry Brooks, Save the Cat! (and its sequel) by Blake Snyder, and Goal, Motivation, and
On my continuing quest to master (ha, ha, as if) story structure, characterization, POV, setting, and all the many important facets of writing a damn good book, I read a lot of craft books and take the occasional online course. I attend chapter meetings and the annual RWA conference. I read blog posts and agent
My writing education has a theme. I cannot learn and apply a new concept or technique until my brain is ready for it. I’ve read book after book and taken numerous classes on all aspects of writing. Characterization, point of view, dialog, plotting, and so on. But often, even if I see the value of
“Did I dazzle you? Did I jump off the page?” Those two lines are from the movie 21, which my husband and I watched over the weekend. I actually liked it, but what really stuck with me were those two lines. In the movie, those words are thrown back in the face of a professor
How do you write a “bigger book”? Yes, I’ve blogged about this before, but a recent series by one of my new favorite writing resources–yes, Larry Brooks over at storyfix.com–helped the concept of “writing big” finally click in my brain. He seems to be helping things click a lot lately. Not sure if it’s Mr.
I once got to work on a charity building project where we took the man’s house down to the studs and built it back up again. (Ha! I know which kind of studs you were thinking of!) Well, today I did that with a movie, but without the build up, or the drywall dust. See,
A few months ago I read a good writing book called Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell. In it, Bell advocates going through six books and writing a note card for every scene to describe its POV, location, type of scene, and purpose. Then when you’re done (six months later), you periodically pull out