People read “Gone Girl” for the crackerjack thriller plot, but there are dozens of clever thrillers published every year. Why did this be...

I talked last time about how I’m not a fan of including lots of third-person POV characters, so it’ll be no surprise that I’m not generall...

Alright, Harry Potter worked well, so let’s do an adult book this time. Obviously, I’m trying to stick to books everybody has read (or at...

I’m all ready to go with the next book, but it’s Thanksgiving week, so I figured I would just wrap up for this week with a review of all the...

It’s my opinion that readers crave as few points of view as possible. I prefer either first person or third person that’s strictly limite...

Should you start your book with a prologue or chapter one? Declaring your opening pages to be a prologue can have its uses. When we b...

It’s the greatest paradox of writing: Readers want heroes to be underdogs, but they don’t want them to be losers. They don’t want your ma...

One of the basic story archetypes is the baby in the basket: A baby is destined for a glorious life, but then, usually to save his life, h...

Update: This post originally said that Rowling had no agent, which is what I was told by my wife, but my mother-in-law has now corrected me ...

So let’s try something new: I’m thinking it would be fun to annotate famous books with my thoughts as to why the writing works. I wish I ...

Stay tuned...

Here’s a rule hiding in a movie write-up from the opening days of the blog. My wife Betsy can always tell when a movie was written or co-...

In too many books I read, the hero is half-in and half-out. She’s not an idiot after all, and she can see that things may go wrong, so sh...

One of the best ways to strengthen the spine of any book is to add a murder-mystery element. The first three Harry Potter books have an (...

Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuses were reserved for women, but he was emotionally and physically abusive to both men and women. In the Was...

Hi guys, James and I discussed in our last podcast that my wife now has a podcast too (one that posts a whole lot more often than ours!)  ...

Last time we talked about the promise and peril of mini-mysteries. It talked about how you always want to be opening some up and ties oth...

Every story has a big unanswered dramatic question hanging over the narrative (Will they win? Will he find love? Will she forgive her pa...

So your hero is going to cheat on his or her spouse, and yet you still want him or her to remain sympathetic to the reader. It’s a tall o...

What’s the worst movie ever made? Certainly one of the candidates is the feature adaptation of The Lorax from 2012. Every aspect of thi...