Every scene you end with a success is slowly killing your novel’s momentum. I’ve seen this pattern hundreds of times. A student with clean prose and characters readers actually care about. People quitting halfway through. No idea why. The problem is always the same: every chapter ends with something resolved. Readers stop reading when they…
Most writers think tension requires danger. It doesn’t. You can have a character in mortal peril and produce zero tension. You can have a character waiting for a phone call and make a reader’s stomach drop. The difference isn’t stakes—it’s information. Tension comes from what your character doesn’t know. When your protagonist walks into a…
After two years of editing(!) Dani’s and my new book, Writing Young Adult Fiction, is about to be published. As one of our fans, I’d like to extend this special pre-publication offer to you: get the Kindle book for just $2.99, or get it for free when you purchase the paperback. My favorite part of the book…
By Alley Carter, author of the YA series The Gallagher Girls Are you a plotter or a seat-of-your-pantser? If you hang out around enough writers you’ll eventually hear that question. And it’s a pretty good one. Everyone has a different approach to plotting. Some people just sit down and start writing; some agonize for weeks or months…
by David Alexander Thirty-odd books ago, when I began writing my first action thriller, the initial installment of the Phoenix series (Leisure Books), I decided to take a critical look at the genre. I wanted to craft dynamic action scenes that would give the reader the most bang for the buck. I was anxious to…
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