It’s not an overstatement to say that backstory can make or break your book. Too much, and your readers may be bored to tears—too little, and they won’t know what’s…
Dialogue is a great tool to establish relationships between your characters and deepen emotional connection to your readers. But if you rely on dialogue alone to show how your characters…
Last weekend at the Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival, I spoke with several writers who have gotten stuck in the middle of their book--what I call the 'soggy middle.'
In 2022, we started asking for loglines as part of the submission process for the RevPit Annual Contest. Because this was new to the contest and a lot of the…
In the best stories, plot and character are so intricately linked that you couldn't pull one out without the whole thing unraveling. If you can, it's going to lead to "can't connect" or "didn't love it." This is called the plot - character connection.
While I tend to read more than the first pages based on the premise, because starting in the wrong place is really common, those first pages can make or break an entry when it’s on submission to an agent or publishing editor—or a reader if you’re self-publishing.
When we think about conflict in a story, we mean two types of conflict: internal and external. Every story must have both kinds of conflict, and they are interconnected--the external…
Every year during the #RevPit Annual Contest, the editors tweet anonymous feedback on participants’ queries and first five pages. This way, the feedback in the tweets is helpful to all…