Just a little more than a week left before November...and the 2016 NANO competition...is behind us.

Did you know that percentage-wise, very few writers who take the NANO leap actually bring in 50,000 words within those 30 days?

I mention this because, should you be at th...

If the story is heading off into cliche world where readers find it possible to know what is going to happen next...and thus why should they keep turning pages to find out if it will...perhaps it is time to take the story in a new direction.

Your characters have been on...

Three is a magic number. If something is done or mentioned or experienced by characters once, you have an opportunity to repeat it two more times.

This could be three people murdered (or at least found dead) in a mystery, but it could also mean three banks get robbed. I...

All the major characters in a story must change/grow from page one to the final page of their story (which could be more than a single manuscript away if a trilogy or series is involved).

This means they have things to overcome or something in the storyline affects them...

To keep a reader reading there must be suspense.

Suspense doesn’t mean danger, though it can, but more a case of the reader wanting to know what happens next.

Questions and possibilities, decisions and indecisions on the part of the characters, if you’d like to look at i...

The fount from which all stories – well, all the BEST stories – flow is characters. Everything that happens in a story has its birth in what happened in ALL these characters’ lives prior to page one.

And the experiences, events, and people of their past all falls under...

Whether you’re right on track with the word count, over what you need right now, or have fallen behind, with half

the month gone there’s still time to stay on track with the storyline…which has nothing to do with the word count, which is the goal for NANO this month. 50...

When it comes to transitions that move a story from one episode to another there are a number of things that can be used.

Transitions, of course, are important because they link the main scenes together as well as provide a bit of color…or normalcy to the tale.

Daily cho...

When you come down to it, 50,000 words is not a complete story in a number of genres. Quite a lot of the “contestants” doing National Novel Writing Month will still have a long way to go (if when all told the story will need to be 100,000 or more, as some fantasy and a...

There is something about approaching the exact middle of a story that tends to slow me down. That’s where we all are here on the 11th day of NANO where, if sticking strictly to the 1667 words per day goal, should mean we also hit the 18337 mark today.

Because I’ll be go...