Archive:
Fiction
Trying to write a short story is the perfect place to begin your writing career. Why? Because it reveals many of the obstacles, dilemmas, and questions you’ll face when creating fiction of any length. If you find these things knotty in a short story, imagine how profound they would be in a book-length tale. Most […]
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Want Jerry as Your Mentor? Learn More You’ve always wanted to write a novel. But something’s stopped you. Maybe you’ve tried before, only to get a few, or several, pages in and lose steam because: Your story idea didn’t hold up You couldn’t overcome procrastination You feared your writing wasn’t good enough You ran out […]
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Written well, a flashback can give your readers insight into a character and add depth to your story. Done poorly, it can feel out of place, forced, and worse—cliched. A flashback constitutes an interruption of your main onstage present story to depict events from the past. If you flash back, you must have a concrete […]
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Want Jerry as Your Mentor? Learn More List a handful of your favorite novels and I’ll bet they have one thing in common: an unforgettable main character. From Captain Ahab to Atticus Finch and from Harry Potter to Katniss Everdeen, such memorable characters seem like long-lost friends. Inventing characters and infusing them with the internal […]
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Full disclosure: I’m not a huge fan of Epilogues. That’s not to say they’re all bad. In fact, I’ve ended several of my novels with Epilogues. Done right, they can be a powerful way to leave your reader satisfied. But beware! Approach your Epilogue wrong and you can ruin the end of your story. So, […]
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