In your stories, settings can and should be doing more for you than just establishing time and location. Settings can help enhance your characters, set the atmosphere and tone of a scene or entire book, and ratchet up the tension and conflict. I show how on the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers blog this month, in […]
revision
Breathing Life into Lackluster Beginnings
By Kelley Lindberg Beginnings. They aren’t easy. You’d think they’d be. After all, that’s where every story starts. How hard can it be, really? You just jump in a start telling the story. But many potentially good stories are stabbed through the heart by the dull wooden stake of a lackluster beginning. The problem with […]
Are Your Settings Stuck In a Rut?
by Kelley Lindberg As humans, we often fall into ruts. We go to the same place for lunch more than we should admit. We read the same types of books and watch the same types of TV shows. We shop at the same stores and rotate through the same recipes for dinner every week. […]
Springing into Revision Mode
by Kelley Lindberg Seems like every writer I know is in revision mode right now. Must be something to do with spring – renewal, rebirth, re-emergence of optimism… After a long, cold winter, we’re all ready for some fresh ideas, so we’ve dragged out our dormant novels and are attacking them with budding optimism. I’m […]
Visions and Revisions, with Cheryl Klein
by Kelley Lindberg Revision. The mere word can strike fear into the hearts of writers. Or hope. It’s where the magic happens. Or the pain. It’s when everything that isn’t David is chipped away. Or when the whole thing crumbles to dust. Okay, melodrama aside, revision is a necessary, unavoidable part of writing anything that […]
Writing a Better Sentence
by Kelley Lindberg When it comes right down to it, writing only involves two things: a good story, and the ability to tell it well. Well, that’s simple enough. Okay, maybe not. Obviously, the most fundamental building block of being able to “tell it well” is the sentence. A benign-looking little thing, really. A subject […]
