Tag Archives: how to write

Quick-Tip Tuesday: Giving Secrets to Your Characters

Giving secrets to our characters sets up plot points for our stories. But secrets do more than that. They add dimension and richness to our characters.  Those secrets become the source of our characters’ vulnerabilities, and often their strengths as well. They get in the way of relationships; or they enhance them. They can put the lives of our characters in danger; and they can enable our characters to escape those perils.

Today’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post at Magical Words grows out of a course I’m teaching for Odyssey Online. The course is called “Point of View: The Intersection of Character and Plot,” and I’m having a great time teaching it.

The post that went up this morning is on giving secrets to our characters as a way of making them deeper, richer, and more interesting. I hope you find it helpful and interesting. You can find the post here.

It’s Quick-Tip Tuesday!!

The first step is to remember that despite the way the “Plotter v. Pantser” debate is usually framed, we don’t have to approach this decision as an either-or proposition. I know people who don’t outline at all; I know people who don’t feel comfortable writing a novel with anything less than a fifteen to twenty page outline. I usually work somewhere between these two extremes. As most people do. Again, it’s not either-or; rather it’s a choice that exists along a continuum.

It’s Quick-Tip Tuesday, and in today’s post over at Magical Words I take on the Plotter v. Pantser debate, with what I think might be a third way. This post is personal for me this time around, because I’m dealing with the issue in my own writing. I hope you enjoy the post and find it helpful. You can read it here.

Best of luck, and keep writing!

A New Quick-Tip Tuesday Post!

With that in mind, I would like to suggest that you use the idea of the narrative theme to stir your imagination.

It can be really hard to come up with an idea on demand for just a generic a story. On the other hand, it can be much easier to come up with a story idea with a little bit more of a hint. In other words, create your own prompts.

Today’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post is up at Magical Words. This week’s unsolicited, free, you-get-what-you-pay-for advice is on the subject of story ideas. I hope you find it useful.

Keep writing!

Happy New Year, and My Return to Magical Words

To repeat something I have said many times before, there is no single right way to do any of this. You have to discover your own creative path. My purpose in writing these Quick Tips each Tuesday will be to help you find that path.

Happy 2016! I’m excited for a new year, filled with new challenges and opportunities. And one of the things that has me most excited is my return as a regular at the Magical Words blog site, with a feature I’m calling “Quick-Tip Tuesdays.” Every Tuesday, I’ll be at the site with a short post highlighting some writing tip.

The first post is up today and can be found here. I hope you enjoy it!

Today on the Blog Tour: Nemesis and Protagonist

One of the things that the first book did not do — because it wasn’t necessary to the plot — was to set up a nemesis for Jay Fearsson who would outlast the narrative of this particular novel. I mean someone like Leo Pellisier in Faith’s Jane Yellowrock novels, or Sephira Pryce in the Thieftaker Chronicles, or the rival powers in C.E. Murphy’s Negotiator series: a character who represents both danger and opportunity for the protagonist, someone who challenges my hero, who threatens him, but who also relates to his darker side.

As I say, there was no room in the first book for such a character. But in the second there is. His name is Jacinto Amaya . . . .

The 2015 Summer-of-Two-Releases Virtual Tour resumes today, after a brief hiatus, with a post at the Magical Words blog site. The post is about creating a long-term nemesis for our protagonist and what that can to infuse energy into our stories. I use His Father’s Eyes, the second volume in the Case Files of Justis Fearsson, as a case study for this. I hope you find it helpful. You can find the post here.

Breaking Down the Opening of HIS FATHER’S EYES

A few weeks ago, around the time of the release of Dead Man’s Reach, I broke down the opening paragraphs of that fourth Thieftaker novel, to give you some sense of what I was trying to accomplish on the first page of the book. It was a fairly standard start — effective and, I think, nicely written — but not all that different from past Thieftaker openings.

I’d like to do something similar today with the first few paragraphs of His Father’s Eyes, as a way of contrasting this opening with that other. You’ll see immediately that the first page of this book is very different. The opening is the least conventional of any I’ve ever written. In fact, it breaks many of the rules I usually encourage aspiring writers to follow.

The 2015 Summer-of-Two-Releases Virtual Tour returns to Magical Words for another post about openings. In this one, I break down the opening lines of His Father’s Eyes, the second book in my Case Files of Justis Fearsson series, which just came out last week. You can find the post here. Enjoy!

Today’s Post: Openings and Hooking Readers, pt. 1

Today’s installment in the 2015 Summer-of-Two-Releases Virtual Tour is all about opening lines for a novel or story. In it, I break down the opening paragraphs of Dead Man’s Reach, the fourth book in the Thieftaker Chronicles (written as D. B. Jackson for Tor Books) which comes out next Tuesday, July 21. (Order your copy now!!) The post can be found at the Magical Words site, at this link. I hope you enjoy it.

Plotting Versus Pantsing Update

Last week at the Magical Words blogsite, which I helped found so many years ago with Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, and C.E Murphy, I posted about plotting versus pantsing. For those not in the writing profession, plotting refers to setting out an outline at the beginning of a project and allowing that outline to guide us through the process of crafting our novels. Pantsing — as in flying by the seat of one’s pants — refers to winging it, essentially writing a novel without having a clear idea of where it’s going.

I am have been, throughout much of my career, a dedicated plotter. But with the third book in the Case Files of Justis Fearsson, I was unable to come up with a decent outline, and so I dove in and just wrote the darn thing. That’s what the post was about (you can read it here).

Well, as I always do with a book, upon finishing the first draft, I put it away with the intention of coming back to it several weeks later in order to revise and polish before submitting it to my editor at Baen. Today, five weeks after completing the book, I began to read through the manuscript, unsure of what I would find.

I’m a little more than a third of the way through the novel. I’ve found some things that needed changing, and I’ve refined my wording here and there. But so far, overall, I like the book very much. In this case, it seems, pantsing was the write approach. We’ll see if I still feel that way when I’m finished reading it.

Visiting with Stephen Leigh!

Today I am blogging at the site of Stephen Leigh, who is a terrific fantasy writer and one of the nicest people I have met in my nearly 20 years in this business. Stephen invited me to his site to help me promote Spell Blind, the first book in the Case Files of Justis Fearsson, and he asked me to write about the differences between writing historical urban fantasy (The Thieftaker Chronicles, which I write as D.B. Jackson) and this new contemporary urban fantasy. And so, we have a new post about point of view, character, and narrative.  The post can be found here. I hope you enjoy it.

Release Day for SPELL BLIND!!

Today is release day for Spell Blind, the first book in my new contemporary urban fantasy from Baen Books, the Case Files of Justis Fearsson. This release has been a long time in coming, and I really could not be happier to see the book in print.

To mark the occasion, I have a post up at Magical Words called “Release Day and Defining Success.” It’s about taking satisfaction in our writing achievements while also remaining ambitious and pursuing ever-greater goals. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you will go out, buy a copy of Spell Blind, and enjoy that, too.  Thanks!