There are a TON of skills you need to get better at to write a good book.
Structure, story-telling, dialogue, description, scene, suspense, explanation, character-building, word choice, energy flow.
If you try to get better at everything at once, you’ll get overwhelmed and not make much progress.
Instead, pick one or two things and focus all of you... See more
Structure, story-telling, dialogue, description, scene, suspense, explanation, character-building, word choice, energy flow.
If you try to get better at everything at once, you’ll get overwhelmed and not make much progress.
Instead, pick one or two things and focus all of you... See more
On Writing Better: 43 Things I Learned from My Insane 2 Years of Study
The novelist Nicholas Delbanco has remarked that by the age of four one has experienced nearly everything one needs as a writer of fiction: love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt, fear of death. The writer’s business is to make up convincing human beings and create for them basic situations and actions by means of which they come to know themselves
... See moreJohn Gardner • The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possib