Mentoring young writers toward fiction writing excellence
Sandra Orchard has been our guest contributor this month. She “forgot” to mention in her bio that her unpublished manuscript won the Daphne DuMaurier Award in 2009. I don’t need to tell you that’s a pretty big deal! She sold her first story to Love Inspired Suspense the next year. If you’d like to read [...]
A guest post by Sandra Orchard Details. Not a hundred of them listed ad nauseum, but key details unique to the POV character that are both fresh and rich in sensory information. Dig deep into the scene. Don’t just say your hero is wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Maybe his mom hung them on the [...]
A guest post by Sandra Orchard Do you scratch your head when someone tells you that you need to “show, not tell”? It’s the key to writing compelling commercial fiction, but an often difficult concept to grasp in all its nuances. Today I’m going to share with you some simple ways to… “Show” emotion without [...]
Protagonists, by story-telling nature, are the ones who are in a dilemma. Sometimes that means they’ve been put upon, taken advantage of, hurt, haunted, or chased after. But occasionally, when we write about their situations, we start to accidentally create such a passive character that we’re really the only ones who are excited about what [...]
I’ve referred in past posts to Larry Brooks’ excellent book, Story Engineering. As I read this book the principles of plotting finally clicked–probably because Larry explains them in architectural terms, and I am a building designer by trade. Suddenly both the rules and the reasons for them became clear, and I’ve been a fan ever [...]
