ALICE E.M. UNDERWOOD · The last thing you want to worry about when ringing in the new year is where to put the apostrophe. Get the nitty-gritty on New Year, New Year’s, and New Years so you can make a toast at midnight and get your punctuation right while you’re at it. When is it “New Year’s”? Use […]
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By Sara Domet Writing a novel is a bit like cooking a gourmet meal. You know you must include your individual ingredients: character, plot, setting, conflict, dialogue, action, etc. But how do you know how to throw them all together? What balance must you strike to achieve the right flavor? How will you put all
—by Karen Dionne Backstory refers to the characters’ history and other story elements that underlie the situation at the start of the book. Backstory helps to establish the setting and makes the reader care about what happens to the characters. But as authors, we need to be careful: Backstory by definition takes the story backward. Whether
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By: Peter Selgin | January 31, 2012 It’s not enough to love our story ideas. We need to weigh their suitability as subjects for fiction, and then figure out how to go about making use of them. This means steering clear of cliché and its sappy cousin—melodrama. Here are 10 tips to help you do just that. (Note:
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