Have you ever been reading and realized . . . it’s been four pages and no one’s said anything? Oh, just me? Readers and writers alike know there’s a lot more to a story than just dialogue. This handy dandy TADA acronym I just learned lays it out—it stands for Thoughts, Action, Dialogue, and Appearance. Gabriela Pereira from DIY MFA discussed how these four elements are what help bring a character to life on the page and introduced me to a tool called the Character Compass tha

Five promises. An author promises the following: 1. Character 2. Voice 3. World 4. Problem 5. Event I covered character in the previous blog when I broke down the protagonist we find in Jake Baker of The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson. For this prompt of the challenge, I’ll be digging into the other four on the list. As a reminder, I’m only partially through this book, so all of what I’m saying is based on the first 60 pages. I’m doing that on purpose because I d

For the second prompt in the DIYMFA WriterIgniter Reading Challenge, we’re supposed to identify the main character. Which, isn’t as easy as you might think. In some cases, like The Great Gatsby, the narrator doesn’t always = the protagonist. Thankfully for me, The Saturday Night Ghost Club’s narrator is the main character and his name is Jake Baker, age 12. I’ll be honest, I’ll try not to spoil anything, but it’s hard to dissect a book without laying out the details. So, you’

Since I’m in the middle of revising my novel and I need to do competitive book research anyway, DIYMFA’s WriterIgniter Reading Challenge has perfect timing! Writers need to know what recent competitive books are out in the market that are in the same genre or that cover the same themes in our work-in-progress for when we query agents for representation. It helps us give them an idea where they can place our book in the market. Sounds like oodles of fun, right? It actually is.