Resource Tips

Plotting: Knowing Which Scenes to Include


writing in notebookHow do writers know which scenes to include and which ones to summarize?

Jody Hedlund, best-selling author of over a dozen YA medieval novels, offers a few great tips on writing scenes.  She says:

“Obviously we can’t write every scene that takes place over the time period of our books which usually spans weeks or months. We have to narrow down how much of our story and character’s lives we reveal on the page. That means we often have to summarize events or leave them out entirely with the assumption that our readers will piece everything together without having to know every detail.

There’s not a hard, fast rule or formula for which scenes to write out in detail and which ones to summarize, but there are a few principles we can keep in mind when choosing scenes to include in our books… 

Read more

Source: jodyhedlund.blogspot.com

Resource Tips

When Your Characters Take Charge…


people photo: swimming team mannybeijing.jpg

Let’s say you’re working on a scene in your story. It’s supposed to be a turning point. You know what’s at stake. You know which characters will be involved. You know what you want to have happen. You know how you want it to end. But somehow when you write it, nothing goes as planned.
Continue reading “When Your Characters Take Charge…”