The Chopping Blog

"In both fiction and narrative non-fiction, I listen for the music in the words."

"They say some writers are 'gardeners' who plant story seeds and cultivate them spontaneously, and others are 'architects' who work from a tight outline. I’m now much more of the latter."

A mystery can be embedded into a novel without it being classified as a mystery. It’s a great way to heighten the tension and stakes in another genre—like a family drama.

There are tricks for making your villains scarier and more memorable—but, as with most things writing-related, there are also some pitfalls to avoid.

Memoir contains many of the same structures as fiction. The memoirist has an equivalent need to create emotional draw in readers—that quality of a narrative that keeps us engaged, anticipatory, and thus turning pages.

"The most important lesson I've learned is to try to finish writing the whole book first."

Postmortem is a police procedural, which means the focus is on the investigative process from the point of view of law enforcement agencies.

When you jump out of your focal character’s perspective to fill readers in on what you think we ought to know, you risk pausing the scene and sabotaging our immersion.

A big congratulations to our client Alan W. Lehmann on his recent publication, Death is a Highway. 

Few romance novels are just about the romance.

A big congrats to our client Ruth Ellen Millard on the publication of her long-awaited historical fiction novel Turnabout Spy.

The appeal of the detective subgenre lies, in part, in its episodic nature. Unlike other genres, mysteries do not (necessarily) need extensive side quests or relationship arcs.