Archive:
The Writing Craft
How I wish I had known as a teenager what I know now! At 19 I worked full-time as a sportswriter for a daily newspaper. I loved my job, but I was ambitious and wanted to see if I could sell a story to the Features editor. I worked hard on one, on my own […]
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Want Jerry as Your Mentor? Learn More A successful novel must feature an event, known as the inciting incident, that irreversibly ignites the story. The stronger your inciting incident, the more dramatic, compelling, and engrossing your novel. A weak or nonexistent inciting incident means no reason for your main character to become heroic, or […]
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Based on what I hear wherever I speak, it’s clear that beginning writers agonize as much over find their writing voice as over any other issue. Trust me, while it’s crucial you find your unique writing voice, it really isn’t all that complicated. You wouldn’t be able to tell that from the plethora of blogs, […]
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Writing a compelling story, especially if you’re new at this, can be grueling. Conflicting advice online can overwhelm you, making you want to quit before you’ve written a word. But you know more than you think. Stories saturate our lives. We talk, think, and communicate with story in music, on television, in video games, in […]
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Great page-turning stories live or die by their plots. “I took the dog to the park” doesn’t interest me. “You won’t believe what happened when I took the dog to the park” interests me. I want to know what happened, so I’ll stick with you as long as your story holds me. To keep me […]
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