In previous posts  I’ve written about Lester Dent’s short story formula . Lester Dent was perhaps the best of the pulp-fiction writers of th...

In a previous post, How to Write a Genre Story: Characters: An Introduction to Character Tags , I talked about why tags are important for ch...

What makes a character memorable? Deborah Chester writes in her article, Bonding with Your Characters : "We want readers to either love...

 Supporting Characters versus Main Characters We want some characters to be one-dimensional, characters such as the impatient pizza delivery...

( Note: I'm starting a series of interviews with other writers. If you would like to discuss being interviewed, please contact me on Twi...

Summary: Setting is an essential part of good writing because a well developed setting helps a writer show rather than tell. Each object in ...

How to Generate Conflict Conflict results from the clash of two things: a character's goal and the opposition to that goal. It follows t...

Let’s talk about what suspense is. Sure, yes, we know what it is in a “I know it when I feel it” kind of way, but if we want our stories to ...