By H.L. Wegley A few months ago I was asked what I would do differently, as a novelist, if I could start again—a complete do-over. In answering this question, most of us would include starting to learn the craft at an earlier age. Now that I am beyond my three-score and ten and into those years Moses called “labor and …
What Do You Do in the Calm After the Storm?
By Glynn Young It’s the calm after the storm. For months, it’s been days and weeks of intense writing, rewriting, editing, re-editing, adding to, and subtracting from. I thought novel #4 would be a relative slam dunk, since large chunks of it have existed for more than a decade. All I had to do was add a few thousand words …
A Virtuous Undertaking
By Ruth A. Douthitt The woman in Proverbs 31 is such an example of how a wife and mother should be, that many women feel threatened by her as if she accomplished all of these tasks in a single day, week, month, or even a year. Nonsense. The chapter provides an overview of what a virtuous wife did throughout her …
Resolving Tension
By Sarah Hamaker As writers, we work with tension all the time—without tension, our stories would sag and our heroes and heroines would have very boring relationships. But this blog is about the tension we experience between what we want to work on and what we have to work on. For many of us, writing is not our fulltime job. …
Tips for Fighting the Dreaded Writer’s Block
By Amy Clipston Through the years I’ve found that my book projects fall into two categories—they either write themselves or writing them feels like having my teeth drilled. In other words, the characters either tell me the story or I push them through the story as if they were dead weight. My book Room on the Porch Swing, which releases …
Hurricane Harvey and the Pirate: Writing Through Storms
By Kathleen Y’Barbo April 1, 2018 is the book birthday for my swashbuckling historical romance, PIRATE BRIDE. As with traditional births, this book was approximately nine months in the making, give or take. So happy birthday to the book of my heart, the book I whose story people first came to me more than twenty years ago. The book that …
Designing
By Christine Sunderland In the early stages of writing a novel, in the choosing of themes and characters, research must be done to create a grand design. In my novel-in-progress, (working title) Angel Mountain, I have chosen to write about the creation of the world in terms of evolutionary theory and genome mapping. I became intrigued, more and more, with …
Plotter or Pantster? Yes
By Suzanne Bratcher You’ve heard the debate: when you write, do you plan first or do you write from the seat of your pants? Until last week I was certain I was a plotter. Once I have the germ of an idea, I draw a story arc, divide the arc into three acts, divide each act into scenes, and list …
Take Me Out to the Ballpark
By Tamara D. Fickas I’m not a big sports fan. I don’t really follow any of the big sports teams, although I do sometimes root for a team based on being the underdog, or the favored team, or because I like a player. Despite not being into sports, I do love baseball. I managed the baseball team in high school …
Your Character’s Voice
by Sarah Sundin (@sarahsundin) I’m a California girl. I’m ashamed to admit I use the word like as filler on a regular basis. My young-adult children use vocabulary not even known in the rest of the country. If I were to write all my novels in my natural voice, I’d be very limited in geography and era. When we speak …