Tag: novel writing
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A Discussion of Narrative Style: Exploring 1st Person PoV in Fantasy
I’d heard a lot about The Cruel Prince by Holly Black in the months prior to me purchasing the novel (which was way back in March if I remember correctly). It’s taken me a while to get to it because I can’t seem to stop myself from buying books this year, but I finally got…
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Fantasy World-Building Fundamentals
A few weeks ago, I broke down some of the major trends in fantasy that might affect what elements of world-building a writer might want to focus on to ensure they had the details they needed to create an immersive world. (See: The 3 Tiers of Fantasy World-Building.) However, that was a general overview based off…
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Extended Book Series and the Fallibility of the Human Memory
As a fantasy reader, I am well familiar with book series. And although I’m just as fascinated by standalone fantasy and the rise of the duology (specifically for their tight narratives), I will never complain at stumbling across a book I really love and finding out that it is the first in four, or seven,…
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The 3 Tiers of Fantasy World-Building
Last week, I wrote a post about genre writing and it got me thinking about how to know when a book has enough world-building and if it has enough of the right kind of world building. (The post was a setting study for Monsters of Verity if you wanted to check it out.) Rather than…
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Stories Within Stories: A Consideration of Novel Structure (Cloud Atlas, Starless Sea, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler)
Stories are funny things. Character, setting, and plot get all twisted together to create something magical, capable of transporting the reader out of the present and into some fictional place of curious make-believe. It’s a fickle process, too. Books that shouldn’t work can sometimes turn out to be biggest craze of the season. Other times,…
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Discussing Fantasy Word Counts
When someone first begins writing books, one of the first things they learn is that page count is far, far less important on the writing end of novels than it is for the reading end. Books are rarely the same dimensions, whether that be in length, height, or both. Line spacing, margins, font and font…
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The Craft of Building Minor Characters
Most people on the internet will tell you how to create your protagonist and antagonist. You know, the ones who admittedly get the most page time. But most people are also hesitant to attempt explaining how one might go about creating the less important characters that will appear throughout your story. It’s a fair problem,…
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Writing Resources for Fantasy Authors
While I was working on my current project–which is a high fantasy piece–there were a lot of resources I found myself pulling from in order to make the story as realistic, consistent, and good as possible. It seemed like a good idea to me to put all, or at least the most important, of those…
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Writing Program Review: Campfire Pro
Back in April (what feels like a lifetime ago), I wrote up a review on the yWriter program I’ve been using for writing-related projects. As I go through making revisions for my current WiP, I decided now is a good time to take a look at Campfire Pro and how useful it’s been for both…
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Eight Character Archetypes, Then and Now
Four years ago, I wrote a blog post on my old Mad Chronicler site called “Who’s Who? The 8 Character Archetypes.” I’ve been thinking about it a lot, lately. Four years is a long time for any individual writer, and even in the bookish community, our understanding of tropes and archetypes can shift in that…
Katie Bachelder 