Your ideas are your babies. They may not be perfect (except in your mind) and may not actually go anywhere in their lifespan, but they are yours. What you do with them is up to you. I am here to tell you how I get mine from dream […]
Welcome back to the next edition on my series Let’s Write A Novel. In my previous posts, I introduced myself and what I intended to talk about in the series. Basically, I want to go through what I do when I start writing a book. I must warn […]
Ok, let me begin by saying (as one of my pages says), I am like you. I have a nine hour per day job and I am writing after hours. I have a self-published novel being sold at Amazon.com. I am not a millionaire, nor do I really […]
If you were to listen to my wife, she would have you believe that I am the most unorganized person in the world. Actually, it may not be far from the truth…in other things. In my writing, however, I want to have everything ready so that when I […]
In a previous post, I showed the structure of a scene. At the time, I thought it was adequate and, up to that point, it was what worked for me. Recently, however, I have come up with another way of thinking about my scenes and how to construct […]
I have been busy doing everything yet nothing at all. I’ve been working on my WIP for several months now and have even finished the first draft of it, that is until I went to revise it. You know what happened? I found that my structure was a […]
So then what is a scene? A written scene is the basic building block of a novel or short story. The scene actually has three parts and is vital to making it work. You have the protagonist struggling to get through to his immediate goal, but there is something in the way. It progresses until the struggle is over and there is a disaster. Often, there is actually a change in scenery, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Your opus awaits. Everything you have said and wanted to say is written in that ever-so-imperfect first draft. You are undaunted. You are meticulous, or so you thought. You planned out everything, or maybe you didn’t but just decided to write it out and hash it out later, […]
There are times in writing when you just have to take a step back and start from the beginning. Now, I don’t mean erased the hard drive, hide the notes, and open a new document on the old word processor. That would be counterproductive, I would think. No, […]
I know this has probably happened to you. Picture this: You are hard at work solving a complex problem; any problem, it doesn’t matter. You get stuck. Your flow is gone. The river has dried up. Or so you thought. Your brain has simply shut down to the […]
T. Lee Messick 