Archive:
The Writing Craft
So, you want a writing career… You have your reasons. You’ve long loved to write, and people have told you you have a way with words. But how do you know the time is right or whether you have what it takes? I urge you to immerse yourself in the craft. If you really want […]
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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 How do you become a better athlete, musician, scholar—or anything? You know. Practice. You run drills, play scales, review flashcards, whatever it takes. So how do you become a better writer? Speaking only for myself, I feel I get better by exercising my writing muscles. In other words, […]
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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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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 for […]
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