Straight talk from the sisters about blood, sweat and ink
Sorry for our brief absence. Did you miss us? Heather and I needed some down time. We logged an insane number of blogging hours during April and our work, writing, health and family lives were starting to suffer. The vacation did its job brilliantly. We’re excited to get back to work and have some fantastic …
Continue reading “Story Twinkies: Do You Need One?”
If you’re a plotter like Heather and I are, you should know about the importance of the midpoint event. It’s one of those important story structure tentpoles Heather will be telling you all about in her O is for Outlining post. The midpoint is when critical new information is introduced to the story and it …
Continue reading “M is for Midpoint”
This weekend we reviewed three books based on revisited fairy tales. You can read more about that here. In case you didn’t realize it, this is a huge trend in books, movies and TV shows. Some of the hottest projects around are adaptations from characters and stories combed from the pages of literary classics: Grimm, …
Continue reading “6 Tips for Re-imagining a Classic Story”
Welcome to part two of Releasing Your Inner Poe. If you missed part one you can find it here. With fall rapidly approaching I’m hard at work on a few projects with dark gothic themes, but more on that in a future post. Since I’m struggling with the task of establishing the right balance of …
Continue reading “Releasing Your Inner Poe, Part Two.”
Love it or hate it, the new Amazon Kindle Unlimited just made it easier for avid readers to sample a huge number of books while paying a fraction of the total cover price. The new program will give subscribers access to over 600,000 titles, many of them Indies, but also some big name authors. …
Continue reading “Could Your Book Make the 10% Mark?”
Thirty years ago we wouldn’t be debating the viability of prologues. Readers assumed writers would build their world and characters a little before diving into the thick of the story’s plot. Now including a prologue can trigger an instantaneous pass from agents, editors and readers alike. So how did we end up in this mess, …
Continue reading “Pro the Prologue or Against?”
If you’ve read my first post, you’ll know I’m a screenwriter who took 2013 off from a career penning cartoons to write a novel. Now it’s 2014 and I’m back in the TV biz writing on a super fun animation show. Not that I’m shelving the novel, no way! I’ll still work on it in …
Continue reading “Screenwriter Tip for Novelists – Pitch Before You Write”
Before I explain what a B-Story is and why it’s crucial, here’s a list of what it is not: Comic relief that is inconsequential to the main story. A side plot that has nothing to do with your hero. A tacked-on love story to appease those who say YA needs a love triangle. These are …
Continue reading “What’s a B-Story? And Why That Love Triangle Doesn’t Cut It”
Whatever your writing process, whether you outline or dive straight into prose, there’s one step we all must do – story edit. There are innumerable things to edit in a manuscript, but let’s start with the bones of the story. After all, adding metaphors and sensory descriptions won’t matter if the story is weak. So …
Continue reading “Story Edit Using The “Save The Cat” Basic Beats”
I picked HUNGER GAMES as the first novel to break down into the Basic Story Beats because I knew it had all the elements in chronological order. After all, I’d read the novel thrice and was familiar with the story. Though I was shocked to find that the Debate didn’t actually happen on the page, …
Continue reading “Basic Story Beats of The Hunger Games (based on the “Save The Cat” beat sheet)”