Hello, readers! Welcome to the second post of The Fourth Descendant’s bonus material. This one goes hand-in-hand with the first one. I called that one the Bones, where I described how the structure of the story came into being. This one is the Meat. It includes the subplots, characterization, and emotion that resonate with readers. The…
Welcome to the first post of The Fourth Descendant’s bonus features. These bonus posts are for those who have read the book. If you haven’t read the book and plan to, turn back now! This post contains spoilers. Come back after you’ve read it. If you haven’t read the book and don’t plan to, I’m…
Yes, the title was intentional. I borrowed it from the department of redundancy department. Telling a story in a concise way should be a goal of the novelist. I say should, because based on the length of some books and what I’ve seen both in published works and in works I’ve critiqued, this isn’t always…
There’s a bit of a misconception out there regarding authors. I know because I had this bright idea before I published that I would write something like “10% of all royalties will be donated to such and such organization” in the front or back matter of my book. Philanthropic, no? Another author told me it’s…
Editing is a vitally important step in the writing process. I don’t know about the rest of you, but my first drafts suuuuuuck. Did you see that episode of Mythbusters where they literally took a piece of shit and polished it to a lovely sheen? That’s the editing process. Though one would hope that the…
Today is Valentine’s Day, and it also happens to be #ArchiveDay on Twitter, through which bloggers like myself share whatever blog posts (preferably older posts, hence “archive”) to drive some traffic to our site. I can’t help but notice a trend in the posts I’m seeing today. To summarize: Valentine’s Day is stupid. And here…
Anyone who’s spent five minutes in a writing group has heard it: that’s telling. You need to show it. I bet the writers among us are groaning a little. Everyone else is scratching their heads. Let’s start with the basics. Telling occurs when you, well, tell the readers what’s happening. Tim was angry. Showing gives clues…
My book came out last Wednesday, so naturally I’ve been tweeting and fb posting and blogging about it. In the sea of eleventy billion books, mine will easily disappear into the abyss if I let it. Here’s the rub, though: many of the authors of those eleventy billion other books are doing the same thing.…
I’m getting ready to start figurative language lessons with my group of second graders. Last year, I used a song or two to help them identify the different types of figurative language. It worked. I looked really good when a student announced to her classroom teacher, “That’s an idiom!” simply because the teacher said the…
Earlier this week, someone asked me why I started writing books. They might have meant what do I believe is the greater purpose, what kind of message do I want to send to the world, blah blah blah. The reality is, I started writing books because of a truck. My husband’s truck, specifically. For anyone…
Allison Maruska 