Novels are fictional stories, but they may be based on historical figures or events. This is what separates a novel from a book: While a book can be any bound piece of writing, a novel is a specific type of book that tells a detailed fictional story. How to prepare to write a novel...
Read our guide on how to write about pain in fiction and how it may help you to leverage pain to add depth to your story, differentiate among characters
You might be tempted to save up flashbacks and back story that you did not include in the beginning for the middle of the book. However, even though this is a better place for them, it is important to make sure they don’t take over the middle. The motion of the book should still ...
the more sensitive you become to the points at which your hearer begins to fidget with impatience because you’re going into too much detail — the more prepared you will be to sit down and write a synopsis that focuses upon that story, not the narrative tricks. ...
Speaking of getting set in one’s ways — or, at any rate, in one’s worldview — do you remember how at the beginning of this series, I mentioned that one reason that there’s so much conflicting advice out there about how to write a winning query letter is that to the people who...
Include the backstory in the first chapter of your novel or in flashbacks throughout the novel to develop your character. If you create a nonhuman character, decide upon a species, the physical description of the character and whether it will be able to speak to humans. For example, Super...
Flashbacks, where you have a whole scene from the past. Diary entries or letters from the past (these can be a bit clunky but can work fine in some novels) A conversation – or an argument! – between characters about their shared history. ...
Atwood writes vividflashback scenesthat show her characters’ natures. When the novel shifts from childhood flashbacks to the older Elaine, however, there is more exposition. Here, Atwood shows how Elaine feels about her life now, a little way into the story: ...
To immerse yourself in the genre, it helps to read plenty of examples across the different thriller categories. Here are some of the most popular and highly-rated thriller novels: Crime Thrillers The Girl on the Trainby Paula Hawkins – A voyeuristic peek into three households takes a twisted...
Alfred Hitchcock utilized flashbacks in his films to surprise viewers with previously unknown information and create twist endings. Or do you prefer your plot twists at the midpoint, when something forces you to reconsider everything that happened up to that point, like in Gillian Flynn's bookGon...