Club Ed for Writers
Telling good stories doesn't have to be so hard.
Category: fiction
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Getting an agent after poor sales
Recently a writer wrote to me asking for help. He’d sold several novels to a small press, and despite winning a number of awards, the books did not sell well. He wanted to know what that meant for his career. Would he be able to get an agent and sell to bigger publishers? Should he […]
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Where to find writing (and publishing) advice
One of the challenges in taking writing and publishing advice from other authors is that they usually know only what works/worked for them. An author who has only been publishing for a little while has a very limited experience to draw from. I understand why published authors want to give advice despite not having expertise—there’s significant […]
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How to show a story
We often talk about telling stories, but how to tell a story is something ofa misnomer for novelists. A novelist needs to show the story.Undoubtedly you’ve heard the old advice, “Show, don’t tell.” And you may haveheard that yes, indeed, you can and should sometimes tell. For example, you don’t need to show Joe’s alarm […]
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Moving from nonfiction to fiction
As a story development editor, I have had a number of coaching clients over the years and almost all of them have been established nonfiction writers who are honing their fiction-writing skills. So you can imagine their most common questions have to do with making this leap. Fiction and nonfiction writing have a lot of […]
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When shortcuts are short circuits
In my many years as a book author, agent, and editor, I’ve met thousands of writers, professional and aspiring, and it has struck me that we tend to do one of these two things, neither of which is in our best interest: We don’t put our work out into the world. We’re waiting for some […]
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Try a common plot structure
If you’re going to give NaNoWriMo a shot this year – and even if you’re not, you’re just interested in learning how to write a story – one of the best ways to get started is to use a common (that is, frequently used) plot structure. If you start writing with an idea of the […]
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Creating a compelling conflict
Often people who want to write a story start with a character or a general situation in mind: “A female superhero with a lasso of truth!” “Terrorists take the president hostage!” And these are certainly perfectly good places to start. But it’s hard to create much narrative drive from situations and characters. Look at those […]
Jennifer Fox
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