What can Lee Child teach us about writing?
By: Ginger | Posted on June 17, 2022
With each new book we publish, our writing improves and we become better authors. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from others, as well. By standing on the shoulders of giants, we might even be able to speed up that process, not to mention learn a new trick or two. And when it comes to thriller writing, Lee Child towers above all the rest, which means he might be the best person to teach us a few things. That’s why this week, Ginger is digging in to what makes Lee Child so successful and breaking it down for us in a way that makes it easy for us to use in improving our own writing. Amazon Prime has a hit on their hands. The first season of their streaming series Reacher, based on the character and books by Lee Child, became the first Amazon production to ever win the… Read More >
Emotions vs Feelings – the difference is character depth!
By: Ginger | Posted on June 3, 2022
A couple of weeks ago we featured visionary fiction author Stefan Edmunds on our podcast, and he outlined a really interesting concept in storytelling – the difference between feelings and emotions. Stefan argued that characters can only reach the triumphant conclusion of their story arc if they allow one to conquer over the other. But is that true? Ginger has done a deep dive into this subject to find out, and he’s here to take us through what he’s found. He even lays out a few examples that are a big help, because when it comes to emotions vs feelings, the differences can be hard to see at first. To many of us (myself included, until recently) the meaning of the words ‘feelings’ and ’emotions’ have been synonymous. They’re both the same thing, right? Wrong. Or, at least, that’s what I’m here to argue. In one of our recent… Read More >
Using Dialogue to Drive Your Story
By: Ginger | Posted on May 27, 2022
Using dialogue properly in your novel is one of the most important things you need to get right, yet is one of the things that so many authors get wrong, or at least struggle with. Back when I first started writing seriously, I read a couple of books on dialogue specifically, and they helped me immensely. But you can gain just as much by simply studying some of the greats, and how they structure the conversations between their characters. That’s exactly what Ginger is looking at today, with a few examples from timeless classics. In a large part, these authors and books are still widely read because they were able to nail their own dialogue so effectively. Some of the most timeless writers of our age remain that way because of their dynamic use of dialogue. Certain writers remain as relevant today as they did when their books were… Read More >
Approaching Your Book from the Inside Out
By: Ginger | Posted on May 20, 2022
There are many paths along the self-publishing journey, but many of the most successful authors pick the well-worn route over diving into the unknown, because they know that the readers are already following that path and returning to it, again and again. It’s familiar, they like the scenery and feel comfortable knowing where it will lead them. The danger of venturing out into the thicket, swinging your literary machete to forge a brand-new path, is that you might end up at a dead end and have to retrace your steps, sometimes starting your journey almost from the beginning. And even then, will anyone want to risk following you into that darkness? You can do both, though. It’s possible to follow the road often traveled, but veer off here and there to make your route more unique. Comfortable, yet different. Today, Ginger is here to lead you through the darkness, and… Read More >
Using Fictional and Real-Life Brands in your stories
By: Ginger | Posted on May 13, 2022
Regardless of your genre, if you’re telling a fictional story then you have some sort of world occupied by characters that use a variety of products and interact with various businesses. If your story takes place on earth, or at least a planet that could be earth, then you have a choice to make. Do you use real products and companies, or do you make them up? It might not be something you’ve ever given much thought to, and if I were to guess, I’d say many authors just subconsciously decided to go one way or the other in their books and rarely waver (their characters typically stop by McDonalds on their way home for drive through, or something like Burgers R Us.) But there are actually a variety of factors to consider when deciding to use real brands over fictional ones in your novels, and so Ginger is here… Read More >
Key questions to help you structure your Story
By: Ginger | Posted on April 29, 2022
Whenever I’m faced with a new idea or concept, especially one that involves multiple steps or any sort of complexity, I find that I can grasp it far more readily if a real world example is used to explain or break it down. Dan Harmon’s story circle is a great plotting tool, and can absolutely help structure your story, but only if you really understand how to use it. Ginger first talked about that tool on this blog a couple of years ago, and since then he’s come up with a list of his own questions that drill into the concept even further. Today, he’s not only sharing those questions with us, but also applying them to a very familiar and popular example as a way to make the entire thing much easier to understand. A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about the Story Circle – a… Read More >
How to Tell a Story
By: Ginger | Posted on March 11, 2022
Knowing how to tell a story is one of the key elements to being an author, but effective storytelling is more than just having a strong grasp of the language and a story you want to tell. If two writers were given the same story to write, told the same key details and given the same list of characters, they would both end up with very different books. And regardless of how great the actual story they were given was, there is no guarantee that both, or even one, of the resulting books would be bestsellers. Whether you’re writing a short story or a novel, you need to weave an engaging tale that takes your readers on a journey, keeping them hooked right through until the very last page. How you do that is the tricky part, but Ginger is here with the secret of how to do just that…. Read More >
What can Ian Fleming teach us about writing?
By: Ginger | Posted on November 19, 2021
I don’t think it’s possible to be a great author without also being an avid reader, first. In fact, while it’s often said that writing daily is the most essential habit an author should develop in order to improve their craft, I think just as important is reading as much and as often as possible. Both of those things are essential ingredients to being a successful storyteller, and there’s no better example of that than Ian Fleming, creator of the iconic character James Bond. There is a lot of benefit in studying authors like Fleming, and as someone who has done just that, Ginger is happy to share what he’s learned. The 25th James Bond movie, No Time To Die, has hit theaters across the world. Some have hailed it as the “savior of cinema” for finally getting people to return to the movie theater after over a year… Read More >
Give Yourself Permission to Fail
By: Nate | Posted on October 8, 2021
There are a lot of famous sayings and quotes about success and failure, but my favorite is one that I find myself repeating to my own kids fairly often. I don’t know the exact wording or who said it first, but I usually phrase it as “you only truly fail by not trying at all.” I don’t know if it’s a product of how competitive a society we all live in these days, but a lot of us (not just kids) have a fear of failure that is often more damaging than failure itself. I doubt there is much success that isn’t built upon a sea of past failures, because there is very little in life that we are born knowing how to do. Humans learn through trial and error, and so it should be expected that we aren’t going to get something exactly right the first (or even second,… Read More >
Eliminating blank page guilt – part 2
By: Ginger | Posted on July 30, 2021
As Ginger noted last week in the first part of this article, writing isn’t just the act of physically transferring words to paper. After all, before we can even start on that we first have to craft those scenes and characters in our heads. That’s why it’s just as important to sometimes relax the pressure we have with regards to hitting arbitrary word counts and instead allow ourselves to live and experience the world, as that is what we all use as inspiration for our stories. Last week, we broke rank and the golden rule of ‘write every day’ and suggested that it was okay to give yourself permission to embrace the blank page until a book was ‘ready.’ Now, that’s all well and good – but what happens when the book is ‘done’ in your head. What are some healthy ways to get back into the swing of… Read More >
