I don’t think it’s unusual for anybody to feel like the last two years haven’t been great. I generally agree with the sentiment, if all you’re doing is surviving, that’s enough. I also don’t think we always need to productivize our creativity. There’s a perversion in the modern compulsion to Always Be...
Oh, the allure of decorative, fancy words! Those sparkling, shiny baubles of the English language that we love to flaunt in our sentences. But too often, they’re just fluff – akin to the gaudy necklace that overpowers a classic little black dress. Overwriting, bedecked with excessive poetic words and swathed in layers of purple prose,
I’ve been running Kickstarter campaigns since 2014, and backing them since way before then. In fact, I just realized I joined Kickstarter all the way back in 2011, even though I didn’t run my first project for 4 more years. Since I started running campaigns, I’ve raised over $70,000 across seven different campaigns from...
Query letters seem like they should be easy, right? After writing a script of several thousand to a hundred thousand words, writing a one-page email should be cake. So why do so many people have problems with it? It’s because they don’t really understand the purpose of a query letter. A query letter is not
I feel like I’ve discussed this ad nauseum, but it was probably tucked into some broader concepts and it’s a HUGE issue. So I wanted to share a very relevant, crucial bit of advice that might make everything easier. What’s backstory? Backstory is usually the deeper, poignant scenes that reveal character motivations. A lot of...
FIRST CHAPTER MISTAKES What follows are some insights I’ve collected, after providing feedback on hundreds of first drafts. I’ve tried to only share general examples that I notice frequently in the majority of inexperienced manuscripts. There is nothing implicitly or inherently wrong with any of these: they are simple, common...
Someone asked me this question recently on YouTube: Where do authors go to learn more about story craft? How do we know when we’ve found a reputable teacher? Is it a college degree in English and literature? What is the best way to learn how to piece together a readable story? I’ve gotten similar questions
I’ve been hearing more chatter about Plottr, the book-timeline software that helps you map out your novel’s key scenes. A while back someone created a pretty cool template based on my chapter plotting outline, and I’ve been talking with Plottr’s founder to add my template within their tool so everyone can access it. That...
I see this question a lot so here’s a quick answer: Novels are typically 250 to 350 pages; with about 250 to 300 words per page. This will depend on genre and word count. Average novels are 75K to 95K, though some genres can go longer – still, it’s very rare for a novel to
Testing out my new theme with this poem I wrote for the preface of Book Craft. Help me test the comments by writing your own poem below! My best words come at night. When soft music is humming and birds or bats are chirping and dusk or dawn is peeking above the horizon. When the
It’s nearly the end of a long year. If you weren’t as productive as you wanted to be, don’t worry about it! But now might be a good time to start using the clean slate of a new year to set goals and level up your author career. The good news is, publishing success is
A novel’s setting isn’t just a backdrop; it’s a living, breathing entity that influences character dynamics, advances the plot, and evokes emotional responses from the reader. Just think about the fog-laden streets of Victorian London in a Sherlock Holmes mystery or the lush, fantastical realm of Middle Earth in J.R.R...
