Go Ahead, Be Mean

You have worked very hard to make your main characters likeable… lovable, even. You’ve developed them into complete human beings in your mind and, hopefully, in your novel as well. But then… you’ve got to be mean to them! You’ve got to destroy their wonderful (or even...

What your characters need most

As you know, if you’ve been following this blog, I’ve been going through some personal unpleasantness recently. I was living in Kyiv just before the war started and have been moving around in uncertainty since. My apartment in Kyiv is in a spot that easily could be...

Piling it on

When I plot out a story I am careful not to overwhelm my reader with too many things going on at once. Especially when it comes to bad things happening. Piling one bad thing onto another onto another could not only get to be too much for the reader, but at some point...

Conflict in a time of conflict

  One of the most important aspects of a novel is the conflict within it. Without conflict, you might have a lovely little tale, but it will be boring, and little will be the keyword because it’s hard to sustain a story without conflict. There are two types of...