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Crafting Fabulous Fiction: Column Archives
by Victoria Grossack
- Characterization
- We All Need Someone To Love: Creating Characters Readers Will Care About
- A Study in Sidekicks
- Extending Your Character Range: Sex, Age and Other
- What Do Your Characters Want? (Part One)
- What Do Your Characters Want? (Part Two): How to Use Characters' Goals to Move the Plot
- Mentors in Your Masterpiece
- My Point of View on Point of View, Part I
- My Point of View on Point of View, Part II
- Character Tags and Tics
- What's In a Name?
- Flesh out Your Writing with Body Language
- Conflict & Suspense
- Raising the Stakes
- What Do Your Characters Want? (Part Two): How to Use Characters' Goals to Move the Plot
- Satisfaction Through Frustration
- Everybody Lies
- Hanging on Cliffs
- Conflict
- Confrontations
- Description & Setting
- Developing Deftness in Description
- Map Your Settings
- Flesh out Your Writing with Body Language
- Setting the Mood
- Dialogue
- What Are They Thinking? Portraying Your Characters' Thoughts
- Interjections and Profanity
- Who Speaks? Pointers about Attribution in Dialogue
- What Should They Talk About?
- Details That Make the Difference
- Prayers, Promises and Prophecies
- Scenes Grown in the Valley of Despair
- Tell, Don't Show
- Arcs of Artifacts
- Titles for Your Texts
- Do You Hear Voices? Refining Your Authorial Style
- The Moral of Your Story
- Plotting & Story Structure
- Stories Within Stories
- Why Doesn't the Dog Bark? Plot Points vs. Plot Holes
- The Order of Things
- Chatting about Chapters
- A Story, B Story, Part One: Why Use Subplots?
- A Story, B Story, Part Two: Challenges of Working with Multiple Plots
- The End
- Levels of Structure in Fiction
- Twisting the Plot
- Plunging Into Your Project
- Exposing Exposition
- Expressing Exposition
- Issues of Grammar & Style
- Tense Matters: Verbs in the Past, Present, and Future
- Parsing Paragraphs
- Grammatical Griping
- Grammatical Groping
- Sensible, Sensitive Sentences
- Connect with Conjunctions
- Pondering Personal Pronouns
- Counting the Words
- Editing for Consistency
- Mixing and Matching Metaphors
- Keeping Your Readers Happy...
- Facts in Fiction
- E-Readers and the Changing Nature of the Story Experience
- The Satisfied Reader Experience
- The Reader's Emotional Journey
- The Author-Reader Contract
- The Novel and Beyond
- The Writer's Marathon: Seven Challenges to a Successful Series
- Fine-Tuning Your Author's Note
- Having Fun with Fan Fiction
- Some Absurdities in Fiction
- The Greater Logic of Fiction
- Writing in Pairs
- Writer's Block, Procrastination, and Other Issues of the Writing Life
- Nine Anti-Muses and How to Placate Them
- How to Get - and Take - Criticism
- Writing under the Influence: Inspiration, Plagiarism and Homage
- Why Don't You Reach the End?
Victoria Grossack studied Creative Writing and English Literature at Dartmouth College, and has published stories and articles in such publications as Contingencies, Women's World and I Love Cats. She is the author of Crafting Fabulous Fiction, a step-by-step guide to developing and polishing novels and short stories that includes many of her beloved columns. With Alice Underwood, she co-authored the Tapestry of Bronze series (including Jocasta, Mother-Wife of Oedipus; The Children of Tantalus; and Antigone & Creon), based on Greek myths and set in the late Bronze Age. Her independent novels include The Meryton Murders, in which she channels the spirits and styles of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie, and Hunters of the Feather, the first in the Crow Nickels (chronicles) trilogy, a set of novels that gives a bird's-eye view of the world. Victoria is married with kids, and (though American) spends much of her time in Europe. Her hobbies include gardening, hiking, bird-watching and tutoring mathematics. Visit her online at https://www.facebook.com/victoria.grossack/.
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Becoming a successful writer isn't just about mastering great writing skills. It's also about overcoming the challenges and obstacles of the writing life: Rejection, fear of failure, lack of time, writer's block, the "Am I Really a Writer?" syndrome, and, of course, friends and family who just don't get it.
Fortunately, you're not alone. We've all been there. So here's a handy "survival guide" that will bring you inspiration, motivation, support and good old-fashioned advice to help you through the tough times. Don't let those writing gremlins keep you from achieving your dreams!
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