Author: steve

Ask a hundred authors whether they need an editor, and ninety-nine say yes. Ask whether they need a cover designer, and half of them reach for a design app. While nobody was watching, the place readers meet your cover moved. It’s under an inch wide now, on a phone, mid-scroll. The cover’s job is to…

“That”s are usually dead weight. In most drafts, most of them come out. “She said that she’d come” works as “She said she’d come.” “I knew that it would rain” doesn’t need the word either. The that is a hitch in the breath, a habit borrowed from speech, and it slows every sentence it sits…

My sister who lives in Tulsa is a doctor. My sister, who lives in Tulsa, is a doctor. One of those sentences tells the reader I have at least two sisters. The difference is a pair of commas. Grammar calls them restrictive and nonrestrictive, which helps nobody. In plain terms, a clause without commas is…

Every manuscript has a scene the writer could recite in her sleep. She has read it so often it has gone glassy. The beat arrives exactly on schedule, and nothing surprises anyone. Before restructuring anything, walk into that scene as a stranger and ask two questions: what doesn’t somebody here know, and what is somebody…

When a horror scene stops working, the culprit is usually on the page. The writer showed the thing. Teeth, mask, face, the full inventory, nothing left in the dark. Whatever frightened us for three chapters becomes a prop the moment it’s lit. Shirley Jackson knew better. In The Haunting of Hill House, the scariest scene…

A bedtime story looks like the least promising place to build comedy. The plot is a wolf chasing a hen across a farmyard. The audience is five years old and has opinions about everything. William McCleery built Wolf Story on that flimsy frame in 1947, and it’s still one of the funniest books in print….

Two people share a kitchen, agreeing about the guests, the traffic, and what time the pie goes in. Nothing is wrong with the dialogue. Nothing is wrong with the pie. The scene is dead anyway, because they agree on everything, and they agree because they know the same things. Scenes run on gaps. Odds are,…

The usual way to deliver backstory is confession. A character finally sits still and tells us what happened. It works, but the reader hears the truth at the same moment the character does, and you lose the thing backstory is best at: the delay. Sharon Creech found a better vehicle, and it happens to be…

A riff is not an adaptation, and it isn’t a retelling. One book riffing on another borrows mechanics and stance, not plot. The source is a tuning fork, not a template: struck once, quietly, so the new book rings in the same key. Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog riffs on Jerome K….

Comedy dies on the page when the writer starts grinning. The narration winks, the jokes get announced. In 1889, Jerome K. Jerome published a book about three men and a dog boating up the Thames. Almost nothing happens in it. It has never been out of print. Three Men in a Boat runs on one…

The semicolon’s one earned job in fiction, why nobody speaks in semicolons, and a three-way read-aloud test for every one in your draft.

When your ending doesn’t work, the fix is usually not a new plot. It’s an earlier decision. The cleanest demonstration ever filmed is Run Lola Run. Lola has twenty minutes. Her boyfriend Manni has lost a bag of money, and if she doesn’t replace it, he will rob a store and probably die. The film…