The Chopping Blog

Your story world’s geography and environment affect the culture, economy, and daily lives of your characters. 

A great novel is honed, not hatched. And to hone your novel, you need feedback.

All fiction is autobiographical in the sense that your characters and story world are drawn from your lived experience of people and places.

If you give your protagonist an internal conflict, they will feel authentic to the reader, and you will create an essential connection between reader and protagonist that is at the heart of all engaging stories.

Honor the tiny beat and it will carry the weight of a whole character for you.

An engaging memoir, while rooted in reality, employs the same narrative devices that make novels compelling.

The counsel to "kill your darlings" has been repeated many times by many editors, writers, and writing instructors.

External conflict is essential to keeping the story moving, but it's the internal conflicts of your characters that make the reader care.

In our personal lives, we expend a lot of energy trying to avoid awkward situations. In fiction, we should embrace them.

Planting false clues or intentionally distracting the reader from what’s actually happening can be a great way to avoid predictability in a plot and create a satisfying twist. Foreshadowing is the tool you need for this type of misdirection. 

"A great novel is honed, not hatched."

A truly effective hook doesn't just make promises—it's also the initial evidence that those promises will be fulfilled.