I recently sat down for a conversation with James Beswick—one of the writers who took my Notes to Novel course earlier this year—to talk about his outlining, writing, and editing journey over the last 12 months. To give you a quick overview of James’s amazing accomplishments, he enrolled in the ...

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the conventions of the crime genre. So, these are the character roles, settings, and events that need to be present in a crime story in order for it to work and to satisfy fans of the genre.  I’m also going to show you how these genre conventions sho...

Stories need both scenes and summaries to work, but it can sometimes be challenging to determine when to use which.  How do you know which moments to dramatize into a full blown scene? How do you know which story events you can simply summarize?  In this post, I’m going to walk you through the ...

If you’re like most of the writers I work with, getting to the end of a first draft feels both exciting and terrifying at the same time. You’ve probably been working on this story for x-amount of months (or maybe even years!) and all you want is for the story you wrote to (eventually) match the v...

In today's post, I'm covering the obligatory scenes of the morality genre. If you want to write a morality story that works—and that satisfies fans of the genre—then you need to nail these six key scenes in your novel. I’m also going to show you how these key scenes manifest in the movie Flight....

I recently sat down for a conversation with Stefanie Medrek—one of the writers I have the immense pleasure of working with—to talk about her writing, editing, and publishing journey over the last few years. To give you a quick overview of Stefanie’s amazing accomplishments, she wrote a first dra...

Do you want to write a story about a character who wants to improve their social or economic position?  In this post, I’m going to cover the ten genre conventions that must be present in your status story to satisfy readers and to write a story that works. I’m also going to show you how these co...

If you want to write a novel that hooks a reader’s interest, then you had better write an engaging first chapter. But how exactly do you do that? Since I’ve already provided resources on how to write a solid set of opening pages, and the big mistakes to avoid when writing your opening pages, I t...

If you want to write a novel that hooks a reader’s interest, then you had better write an engaging first chapter. But how exactly do you do that? Since I’ve already provided resources on how to write a solid set of opening pages, and the big mistakes to avoid when writing your opening pages, I t...

Are you thinking about indie publishing your novel? If so, you probably have a lot of questions like… What kind of book cover should I design? How do I format an ebook? Should I produce physical copies of my book or stick to ebooks only? How should I price my self-published books?  Figuring ou...

Are you hoping to traditionally publish your novel? If so, it probably feels like there are a thousand questions to answer… Do you need an agent? How do you get an agent? What’s involved in the querying process? How much do traditionally published authors get paid in royalties? Right? There are...

If you want to write a novel that hooks a reader’s interest, then you had better write an engaging first chapter. But how exactly do you do that? Since I’ve already provided resources on how to write a solid set of opening pages, and the big mistakes to avoid when writing your opening pages, I t...