Archive:
Plot Development
You have a message to share with the world, but so far, people don’t seem interested. Are you wasting your time? You are if your nonfiction fails to engage an agent or publisher. You may have forgotten the importance of storytelling — yes, even in nonfiction. Adding stories to your nonfiction: Hooks your reader from […]
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Want Jerry as Your Mentor? Learn More You can use a variety of literary devices to add conflict and tension to narrative fiction. But few make readers work harder than the unreliable narrator, a device that, true to its name, allows the storyteller to take readers on a wild goose chase as they determine […]
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Want Jerry as Your Mentor? Learn More Knowing the history of your main character allows you to craft a character arc that keeps readers engaged from start to finish. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, author C.S. Lewis sends the Pevensie children to live with a professor in the English countryside to […]
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Writing a series is daunting. Each installment must both stand alone and work as part of the whole. You’re forced to keep up with all the elements you exploit in a single novel and make sure they serve the entire entity: characters, plot, settings, everything. Having written six adult series and ten children’s series, I […]
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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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