100 Resources to Help You Write Your Novel
The biggest challenge to writing a novel is enduring to the final two words—THE END. Between the first line and the last are questions, choices, doubts. Sometimes they get the better of us, sometimes and we quit before the draft is complete.
The following articles contain insights, inspiration, maps and methods, answers to questions, and myriad tools to get unstuck.
Story arises from the impetus that starts the imagination on a quest to create a world in which the idea can grow in a movement toward meaning. Learn how to generate, recognize, and test your story ideas.
Keeping Confidence When Sails Deflate
Heard It Through the Grapevine
The Myth of Marital Bliss
A Picture’s Worth 1000 Words
Theme is the tangential force that unifies story elements and instills those elements with meaning. From theme, the writer weighs in with a premise, and the story gains its philosophical, psychological, or spiritual spine. A well-crafted premise forces the writer to identify a main character, a central conflict, and a general plot. Like a mini-outline, the premise illuminates the story’s best course.
Understand the dynamics of theme and premise, learn how to differentiate and utilize the two.
Every Story Needs a Theme
How to Write a Story Premise
Plot Structure & Development
Story is a record of years, weeks, days, while plot derives and conveys meaning from a span of years, weeks, days. A hero wants something, goes after it despite opposition, and arrives at a win, lose, or draw. Unlike a chronicle of events (when someone says this happened, then this, then that) plot is dynamic. Plot is an interplay of forces coming together, pushing against each other, incrementally advancing while simultaneously coming to a boil, and ultimately achieving equilibrium.
Discover how to maximize the physics of drama.
Plot Structure in Three Acts
Plot: The Inciting Incident
Plotting Your Novel’s Middle
Plotting the End of the Middle
Filling the Emotional Void
Balancing the Plot Triad Part II
An outline provides milestones along a story’s route and makes sure the writer hits his plot points while steering clear of detours. Of course, some wrong turns amount to genius, but an outline can help to identify what is genius and what is superfluous.
To Outline or Not To Outline
The Outline as Plot Development
Outlining The Ten Story Elements
Outlining The Ten Story Elements Cont’d
Knowing what your characters need from you to take on a distinctive persona is integral to their creation and the success of your novel.
What goes into a great first line—a line so promising that readers commit to the next two chapters?
Creating Funny Characters
Fatal Flaws in Literature, Film, & Television Characters
The Enneagram Personalities
The Enneagram in Literature
Fiction’s Best Characters
Joseph Heller’s Yossarian from Catch-22
Anne Tyler’s Maggie Moran from Breathing Lessons: A Novel
What goes into a great first line—a line so promising that readers commit to the next two chapters?
Your Novel’s All-Important Lead
Begin With The Unprecedented
7 Ways NOT to Begin Your Novel
What goes into a great ending—an ending so satisfying that readers commit to buying your next novel?
The dos and don’ts of writing dialogue that will move your story forward while establishing characters.
Everyone enjoys a laugh, but some writers are better than others when it comes to getting a chuckle from their readers. As E.B. White wrote, “Humor has a certain fragility, an evasiveness which one had best respect.” But understanding the patterns and repetitions that breach expectations, writers are able to craft the benign violations that tickle the brain and add to the texture of any genre piece.
Humorous Word Choice and Arrangement
Words With a Humorous Ring
Characters That Get Us Laughing
Editing is everything. Know what to look for and how to self-edit your novel.
Editing Your Manuscript Part II
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