I get asked a lot about whether the characters in my stories are based on real people, and the answer is yes… and no, and for most writers, that’ll be true. A little piece of me is inside every character I write. It’s inevitable, because the characters are coming from me. As a writer, I’m…
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I’ve got characters on the brain. I’m preparing to teach my Throw More Stones: How to Build Character Through Conflict workshop for the Writers League of Texas next month, and it’s a subject I love to talk about. But developing characters was not always easy for me. The first novels I wrote had my characters…
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I’ve been wanting to do book reviews for a while to spotlight the great books I’m reading, but I wanted to lean my reviews toward writing and editing and couldn’t come up with quite the right format. Until I had a sleepless night during the Texas Library Association convention in Houston earlier this month and…
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Angela Ackerman (a.k.a. The Bookshelf Muse) has finished her collection of posts about her seven deadly sins of novel writing, and they’re good to read for writers at all stages of a manuscript. On Monday, I’ll be beginning what I think — hope — will be my last revision of my current novel, and as…
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Revision update: Things have been going well. I’ve been steaming through the chapters, getting about six done in the past few days. It feels good. Utah Children’s Writers’ Scott Rhoades wrote a fun New Year’s blog post yesterday with some ideas to help writers in this year. I thought I’d share my favorites and add…
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Revision update: Nada! I’m away on vacation, but I’m going to get back to it soon. Anita Nolan posted a link to character questionnaires from the Gotham Writers Workshop. They’re very useful, and I plan to bookmark the page, but it made me think of how we get to know our characters. I read about…
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Revision update: Too many late nights, and I haven’t moved forward. I must get up earlier tomorrow! Today, Day By Day Writer is thrilled to be participating in the blog of author Therese Walsh, who’s debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy, was just released. Therese has written a fabulous guest post on research…
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Current word count: 19,901 New words written: 1,067 Words til goal: 20,099 / 436 words a day til the end of September I had a good writing day and made my weekend goal in one day. Yay! Hopefully I can do the same tomorrow. We’ll see. The story is coming together again now that the characters…
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Current word count: 16,822 Words written today: 394 Words til goal: 23,178 / 367 words a day til the end of September Additional writing: revised two chapters in first novel. Now on chapter 20 of 33. Yesterday I said that, as well as working on my new book, I have been revising my original novel,…
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