5 Essentials of a First Chapter

by Susan May Warren, @SusanMayWarren

There are a lot of checklists for building a first chapter, and sometimes they can get overwhelming. Over at My Book Therapy we have an advanced checklist we use to help people build their first scene (it’s the same checklist I use when building my first chapters!). However, I admit, it can get overwhelming.

So, let’s start with just 5 things. (I made a nifty acronym to help you remember, just because that’s how my brain works. You don’t have to use it.)

You’re starting your story at the edge of a C.L.I.F.F.:

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How to Write a Suspense

by Susan May Warren, @SusanMayWarren

Summer is in full swing. Which means one thing: We’re one season closer to football. We love football, and the wait is killing us. But one of the things I love about football is that it’s a great metaphor for nearly everything.

Like writing a suspense novel. A football game has all the elements of a great suspense novel: the players we love, an objective, a playbook on how to win the day, villains, truth tellers (called coaches) on the sidelines and deadline for “game over.”

I could blogged all year about suspense, but I can’t cover all that territory today, so we’re going to touch on the one big element every suspense should have: The Big Event.

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Getting Your Story Summary onto The Page

by Susan May Warren, @SusanMayWarren

I know that people panic about writing a synopsis. The fact is, there are many different synopsis styles and deliveries. There is no one right way – but there are few principles.

Let’s start with Delivery:

You can write the synopsis a couple different ways.

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Finding Your Romantic Story Arc

by Susan May Warren, @SusanMayWarren

If you are writing a romance, it can sometimes be difficult to know exactly how to build all the pieces so that you have the right amount of tension in your story. How soon do you make them fall in love? When do you start breaking them up? How do they get back together?

This problem is solved by understanding the two main story arcs of romance: The Why/Why Not, or the Why Not/Why. (These arc models apply to both a straight up romance, or just a romance thread.)

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Black Moment Construction

by Susan May Warren, @SusanMayWarren

The Black Moment in your novel is the most important part of your novel.

I just had to say that because I see so many manuscripts that pull their punches on the Black Moment. Authors have fallen in love with their characters and they just don’t want to hurt them. But creating a powerful Black Moment is what both the character and the reader need to convince them they must change.

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Make Your Heroine & Hero Unique

by Susan May Warren, @SusanMayWarren

How do you make your hero or heroine unique? Have you ever written a hero or heroine and thought…oh, they seem just like the last character I created? It’s easy to do – you can only pick so many creative combinations for your character…UNLESS…

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Be a Voice, Not an Echo

by Rachel Hauck

Writing in the Christian market pushes us to go beyond the realm of this life to find meaning and purpose for our characters. While we are not writing sermons and devotionals set in fictional places with fictional characters, we are imitating life.

For the Christian author, Jesus is very much a part of our every day life. We want to express Him in some way in our stories, through the lives of our characters. But often our stories sound hokey, canned, full of Christianese. How we talk in the foyer at church, or in Sunday school class does not translate into fiction.

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