What's New at Novel Writing Help

Welcome to the Novel Writing Site Blog - the place to come to read all the new material (and updated old material) added to the Novel Writing Help Web site.

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Mar 17, 2010, Romantic and Realistic Fictional Characters - Novel Writing Help

Broadly speaking, fictional characters can be divided into two varieties: the extraordinary and the ordinary, those just like us and those not like us at all, the romantic and the realistic.

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Mar 14, 2010, The Essential Novel Writing Guides - Novel Writing Help

Here are the detailed contents of the Essential Novel Writing Guides. Scroll down the page to get an idea of just how comprehensive guides are, but don't worry if not every heading makes complete sense. It is all clearly explained in the guides themselves.

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Mar 12, 2010, Descriptive Writing and the 5 Senses - Novel Writing Help

I talked about engaging the senses in descriptive writing in the Narrative Writing Section. There, I said that, when describing characters and settings in a novel, you must take care to evoke all of the senses and not just the most obvious one - sight.

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Mar 7, 2010, Submitting a Manuscript - Novel Writing Help

Before talking about how to go about submitting a manuscript of your novel, the first thing to deal with is who, exactly, you should approach

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Mar 7, 2010, Narrative Writing - Novel Writing Help

Here is a dictionary definition of narrative writing: The narrated part of a literary work, as distinct from dialogue. This section looks at how to structure a narrative (primarily through showing and telling) and at the art of descriptive writing.

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Mar 7, 2010, Descriptive Writing - Novel Writing Help

Descriptive writing is a way of putting words down on paper so that they paint a picture. Novel writing is not a visual medium, but novel writers nevertheless want readers to visualize the stories they tell. Descriptive writing is the way they achieve this.

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Mar 7, 2010, Writing Prose with Variety - Novel Writing Help

This article is all about how to achieve variety when writing prose. But before I talk about how to do that, I should first say that variety is something you should aim for in novel writing in general, not just when writing prose.

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Mar 7, 2010, Writing Fiction With Pace - Novel Writing Help

What does writing fiction with pace mean? There is really nothing complicated about it. It simply means writing fiction that is fast (pacey) enough not to bore the readers, but slow enough that you don't leave them unsatisfied.

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Mar 7, 2010, Writing a Narrative - Novel Writing Help

There are two ways of writing a narrative. One is by showing and the other is by telling. It is how you combine these two methods of narrative writing that will ultimately determine your novel's success.

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Mar 7, 2010, How to Write a Book - Novel Writing Help

When I say How to Write a Book, I'm talking about the actual writing, or the setting down of words on paper in the form of prose - as opposed to planning the book, which is what you have been busy doing up to now.

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Mar 7, 2010, The Cure for Writer's Block - Novel Writing Help

Writer's block can actually afflict any part of novel writing, starting with an inability to come up with a decent idea in the first place. Mostly, though, it is associated with writing a first draft. Is there a cure for writer's block? I believe so, yes.

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Mar 7, 2010, Writing a First Draft - Novel Writing Help

The process of actually writing a novel couldn't be simpler. Start by writing a first draft. And that means filling several hundred blank pages with words. Not pretty words, necessarily, but words which accurately convey WHAT you want to say in the novel. Then revise that draft. Which means getting HOW you say it right.

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Mar 7, 2010, Combining Story Elements - Novel Writing Help

So far in the planning phase of the novel writing process, you have been looking at all of the story elements - plot, character, viewpoint, setting, and theme - in isolation. It is now time to combine these story elements to make the Final Plan

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Mar 7, 2010, 1st & 3rd Person Point of View - Novel Writing Help

So which is best: 3rd Person or 1st Person? As you can probably guess, there is no answer to that question. 1st person point of view is the better choice for some novels, 3rd person point of view for others. It all depends on the material

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Mar 7, 2010, The Fiction Genres - Novel Writing Help

This section on the fiction genres is for those of you who have decided to specialize in one of the commercial categories of fiction - crime novels, horror novels, and so on. Unlike literary fiction and mainstream fiction, genre novels are governed by rules which you must more or less stick to if you wish to be successful.

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Mar 7, 2010, How To Write A Novel - the Novel Writing Process

Learning how to write a novel can be confusing, probably because there are so many elements to the novel writing process: creating characters, writing a plot, writing all the subplots and so on. It's little wonder that the question I am most often asked about novel writing is, Where do you even begin?

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Mar 7, 2010, Learn How to Write Prose & Dialogue - Novel Writing Help

Learning how to write prose and dialogue like a professional writer isn't so much a step in the Novel Writing Process as a lifetime's work. You are not going to become a master wordsmith in a couple of days. But I have included it here because it seemed like the most logical place to put it.

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Mar 7, 2010, Novel Writing Process Step 6 - Novel Writing Help

You are probably thinking that the Novel Writing Process has placed an awful lot of emphasis on planning and not very much on the thing that drew you to novel writing in the first place - the actual writing. But that is quite deliberate

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Mar 7, 2010, Write a Novel Outline - Novel Writing Help

A novel outline is the bridge between the simple idea you came up with in the previous step and a full-blown plan for the novel. Writing a novel outline isn't a crucial step in the writing process, but personally I find it very helpful.

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Feb 28, 2010, Writers On Writing - Novel Writing Help

The monthly Writers On Writing series is not about offering you a glimpse of what other creative writing instructors have said on the subject. Instead, it offers insights into what some of the true greats of literature have had to say about the practice of their craft.

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Feb 12, 2010, What Is a Story Setting? - Novel Writing Help

A story setting is the backdrop against which the characters act out the events. A story with a poorly portrayed setting is like a play taking place on a virtually bare stage - you have character and plot and theme but no sense of place.

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