Don’t give your reader an excuse to put your book down! Make sure your book looks more appetizing than a cheese sandwich by avoiding these nine pitfalls. 1) Leisurely Descriptive Passages Ever read a book where the author spends multiple pages describing a house? Or maybe it’s a spaceship, or the way the light plays upon…
Tension
The Tension of Unfulfilled Disaster
I recently saw an advanced screening of the film The Spectacular Now. This honest and moving film is based on Tim Tharp’s YA novel (which also happens to be a National Book Award Finalist). The story follows Sutter Keely (Miles Teller), a high school senior determined to live in the present and forget the future, as…
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Conflict vs. Connection
One of the big rules we always hear about writing is that there must be conflict! Without conflict you have no tension, no stakes, and the story doesn’t go anywhere. Some say “without conflict you have no story” at all! Therefore we should always be on the look-out for the conflict in a scene and use it to…