* Available April 2009 *
Through detailed instruction and valuable exercises, award-winning novelist Laura Whitcomb addresses everything from premise development to foreshadowing to tone and beyond. You’ll uncover shortcut strategies and tools like: a four-step approach for crafting stronger scenes, plot-planning devices, guides for building your story around essential moments, and comprehensive checklists featuring quick fixes to common story gaffes. Novel Shortcuts is your roadmap to a smooth and expedient writing process.
Excerpt
When you decided to write your novel, there was a reason. It might have been because you liked the idea of being a novelist, or it might have been because you were already a published novelist and your editor was expecting a draft by the end of the year, but more likely there was something about the idea for your novel that drove you to choose it.
In the Learning Channel’s documentary The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, narrator John Romer explains why certain statues and structures were chosen as historic icons. He stands at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and tells us that the landmark below is not the tallest or the longest or the oldest or the most beautiful of its kind, but that it doesn’t matter because, “it’s all about wonder.”
It’s the same with writing. A story doesn’t have to address a subject that has never been touched on before, it doesn’t need to win a Pulitzer Prize, or be a thousand pages long, or encompass twenty years of research. Storytelling is about wonder.
