A friend of mine very close to publication asked a question on one of my writers loops about her opening chapter. A friend who had read it thought the first chapter was too slow. She said that she set up the heroine’s “ordinary world” ala Vogler (and everyone here knows how much I love Vogler!) but wanted to ask people what they felt about slower openings. I don’t have an answer to how slow or fast the opening should be. It depends on the story. BUT we all know that the first five pages are the most important in pulling… Read More

I had a bunch of ideas to blog about. I could recap RWA, but that’s now old news. I was considering writing an open letter to International Thriller Writers about the importance of NOT scheduling their conference for the same week as RWA, but I decided to make that a private letter so only one person gets mad at me instead of hundreds. And I already lost that battle . . . So, as I do when I’m drinking my morning coffee (before the brain cells start communicating with each other), I surfed around a bunch of blogs I’d missed… Read More

There are only two ways to write. Either put your fingers on a keyboard and type away, or pick up a pen and do it the old-fashioned way. Now that you know how to write, you might ask why are there so many dang rules out there? That you have to plot (or not); that you can never change POV mid-scene (except sometimes); that you have to introduce your hero/heroine by page 32 (or the end of chapter one, or chapter five . . . ) We all have rules we like and follow (most of the time.) And because… Read More

Okay, I’ll admit it. I love the hero’s journey. No, I don’t use it to plot my books. No, I don’t make sure that I have every step of the journey in my revisions. What I love is when I finish a book and can see the hero’s journey seamlessly laid out, the layering of journey upon journey, intersecting at key points in the story. If I can’t see the journey after I’m done, I know I have some work to do. Why? Because the hero’s journey is part of our storytelling heritage, the nexus that unites all of us… Read More

I remember one of the first questions my agent asked me when we were discussing representation was how many books I could write in a year. Her comment was that publishers really wanted at least one book every nine months. I told her that was definitely possible, and my goal was to eventually write four books a year. My long term writing goal has always been to produce four books a year once all my kids are in school. (Wow, six-and-a-half hours of uninterrupted writing time . . . I can hardly wait!) Why? Two reasons: First, I have so… Read More

Okay, we have a theme this week and my diversion is . . . I’m writing about something completely different. Which is really the story of my writing life. It took me years to get serious about my writing. Why? Because every time I started a story, I’d get 50-300 pages into it and then . . . get a better idea and start something new. But I have a good reason for going off on a tangent today. Several authors and I were chatting on-line (okay, there’s MY biggest diversion from writing: the Internet. End of story. See, what… Read More

Periodically, discussions on writers loops come around to hooking an agent . . . or an editor . . . or a reader. The “high-concept” premise is thrown out as something to aspire to: explain your story in 25 words or less using ideas and images readily understood by the average buyer. But when it comes down to the actual book–and getting readers invested into the story–it’s the first couple pages that often make the difference. Sol Stein said in Stein on Writing: Some years ago I was involved in an informal study of the behavior of lunch-hour browsers in… Read More