Fan Art

      While attending a writer’s conference last year, I was introduced to the idea of writing about the physical effects of emotion on a character. In most of my Minecraft-inspired novels, I’d say, “Gameknight was overwhelmed with fear.” Or “Fear...

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I approach my story planning. In the last couple of books, I’ve focused on designing the character first, but using opposite characteristics to make the character or environment more interesting. In The Giant’s Giant, I made a...

In stories, the opening scene is super important. It must capture the attention of the reader like a constricting snake and refuse to let go. This scene must make the reader say to himself/herself “Wow, that’s really interesting; I wonder what’s going to happen next?”...

Recently, when I start thinking about a new story, I find myself really focusing on the character and their flaw. Character flaw – Every hero must have some kind of flaw to them. They can’t be perfect, and they can’t be totally despicable. We want the reader to root...

When I first started writing, I did a terrible job with the two topics of this post: echoing and character names. This is a problem I see in many young writers as well as some older, inexperienced writers like I was a few years ago. Echoing is the use of words...

  The Dark Night of the Soul (DNofS) is likely one of the most important parts of your plot and deserves significant attention when you are developing your story. Let me try to define what it is, or at least how I use it. Dark Night of the Soul: This is a scene in the...

Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___. The above paragraph is referred to as Pixar’s Rule #4. A Pixar storyboard artist, Emma Coats, @lawnrocket, compiled a list story wisdom she...

I’ve been working on my next book, called The Giant’s Giant, and I’ve had a lot of trouble getting it going. For some reason, I start writing a couple of chapters, then get stuck and don’t know where the story is going. I start over, and again I’ve gotten stuck. It’s...

  As those of you who read my Minecraft-inspired novels know, battle scenes are a big part of my stories. In my earlier books, I really didn't understand the purpose of the battle, other than to raise tension, but over the years, I've realized that battle scenes...

  Hi everyone. I wanted to talk with you about something I've slowly been learning and getting better at, I think, as I write more books, and that's sentence structure. When I go back and look at my very first books, all of which you can no longer find online. ...

  There's a rule in writing, and of course, whenever I say there's a rule, I'll think of multiple ways of breaking it, but so far, I've never broken this rule, and it goes like this: Rule #10: If your hero needs a gun at the end of the story - You must show that...