“I’m getting the feeling you don’t love me anymore.” Sally sat down, smiling, into her chair at the coffee shop. “I love you. I just love my friends at ACFW and MBT too,” I said from the coffee counter. Between school starting and the various writers conferences over the past two months, we’d barely had time to chat. “Prove it,” she said. “Show me the love.” “I’m here, aren’t I?” I was dressed in a football sweatshirt, wearing my Uggs and old jeans. “On my way to a football game. Doesn’t that say love?” She raised an eyebrow. “Which brings me to the topic of our conversation today – showing emotions through action. And I’m not talking about facial expressions or even physical reactions. I’m talking about […]
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TEE’s What and Why: The Ds
Ah, the fun of writing a novel. You, the writer, get to wreak havoc on your characters – all the while ignoring any and all havoc in your life. (At least for a little while. You must return to reality at some point.) Wreaking havoc – that’s just another term for “the Ds”: the events that distance your hero or heroine from their goals. Let me be more specific: What: The Ds Think Distancing, Denial, Disappointments and Devastation. Yes, there are Dreams and Delights too – even a dream-come-true, like your heroine getting offered that job she’s always wanted – can wreak havoc in her life. Ds distance a character from what they want, deny them something – a relationship, maybe – and create a Y in the road, forcing […]
Read the RestTechniques for Layering Emotion into a scene: Other People
“Hi Susie. Um, Susie?” Sally sat down in a chair opposite me, handed me a coffee. “Kathy said you’d forgotten this.” I took it, tearing my eyes from the woman I’d been watching across the room. She wore a pair of sweatpants, the baggy kind, an oversized sweatshirt and a bandanna over her hair. Curled up in a leather chair, she was drinking coffee while buried in a novel. I sighed. “I want to be her. Just take a day off and read.” “That’s apparent, by the look on your face,” Sally said. “I know you’ve been busy these past few weeks – hello, I completely feel abandoned, but you look like you want to go rip that book from her hands, push her out of the chair and take […]
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Maximizing Your Rewrite
I just finished a rewrite of Once Upon A Prince, releasing April 2013 from Zondervan. Covered nearly 87K words in two weeks. Not my favorite thing to do – tackle a rewrite in two weeks but that’s how it worked out. The opening needed a big change in my mind as well as my editor’s. Openings are my weakest. I tend to tell too much story. Not back story per say, just too much “pipe” as we say at My Book Therapy. I build too much story world. So I needed to tackle the opening and when I do that, I tend to ripe to shreds and start over. I probably rewrote the opening five times. Here’s the danger in doing that: forgetting other correlating threads in the story. I […]
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