I did some posts a few weeks ago about the five files I keep on my screen while I’m writing. I posted four but somehow spaced out doing the fifth. My apologies (and thanks to Peter Brockwell for reminding me). Here it is now: I call this fifth file CULLS. Have you ever seen an inspection station for tomatoes or potatoes? A conveyor belt shuttles the fresh-from-the-field produce past a line of human checkers (usually farm kids being paid eight bucks an hour.) The good taters and peaches sail past and get boxed up for market. The bad ones get…

Almost any story, if it’s gonna have real power in the climax, needs a blockbuster bang or invention—something that nobody’s seen before or, if they have seen it, something they’ve never seen done in this unique way. Often this bang is contrived and pushes the bounds of believability. Can a sperm whale really ram and sink a whaling ship? Can Vin Diesel really leap a car out of one skyscraper, soar across 100 feet of empty space, and land safely inside another skyscraper? (And, by the way, is his name really Vin Diesel?)

[We and Penguin Books will be giving away 200 free copies of The Lion’s Gate paperback, ahead of a Google Hangout with me and August Cole, co-author of Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War and director of the Atlantic Council’s Art of Future Warfare project. On June 25 at 3pm ET we will discuss how creativity is literally a lifesaver when resources and time are short and the odds are stacked against you. Which, for writers, is most of the time. Enter your address using this sign-up link and we’ll send a copy your way. More details…

Paperbacks and hardbacks: this is an area, I confess, that I’ve been absolutely clueless about. You write a book. It gets published. The hardcover comes out. Then a year later comes the paperback. The paperback always has a different cover. If the hardback had a classy cover, the paperback usually has a slightly-less-classy cover. But maybe (you hope) it’s a more commercial cover. Sometimes your book appears in its second life as a “trade paperback,” meaning a quality piece of workmanship, on good paper, weighty, only slightly smaller than the hardback. Other times it shows up as a “mass-market paperback,”…

Writers are always obsessing about “narrative drive.” We know what it means. It’s the propulsive, page-turning momentum that we all hope to generate in our readers. But how do we create narrative drive? A priest, a rabbi, and an alligator walk into a bar … That’s narrative drive. There’s no way you and I are not gonna stick around to hear the rest of that joke. Why? Because a question has been planted in our minds, an open-ended question that has hooked us and makes us want to know the answer. (By the way, I just invented that set-up; if…

We’ve been talking over the past couple of weeks about the five files I have on-screen when I’m working on any project—fiction or non-fiction—and how the use of these files dovetails with the principles Shawn puts forward in his new book, The Story Grid. The files are my idiosyncratic way of applying Shawn’s universal principles. To refresh our memory: 1. The actual working file of the story. 2. Conventions of the Genre. 3. Scene by Scene. 4. MissingMissingMissing. 5. Culls So far we’ve talked about Conventions of the Genre and MissingMisssingMissing. Today let’s turn to Scene by Scene. In The…

We were talking a couple of weeks ago about my own idiosyncratic way of using the principles detailed in Shawn’s new book, THE STORY GRID. Specifically I mentioned five files that keep on my screen from Draft #2 onward. 1. The actual working file. 2. Conventions of the Genre. 3. Scene by Scene. 4. MissingMissingMissing. 5. Culls. The post from two weeks ago was about Conventions of the Genre. Let’s talk today about Missing Missing Missing. I had a boss in advertising in New York when I was a copy cub. His name was Bob Froelich. He was in charge…

What makes a book ready for Prime Time? What takes our manuscript from “almost but not quite” to “Wow, get this one under contract TODAY!” In one word: editing. It’s the editor, not the writer, who whips the book into shape. It’s the editor who identifies what’s working and what’s not working—and helps the writer bring it all together into a saleable, publishable work. Today I’m thrilled to announce to our blog readers that Shawn Coyne’s much-anticipated book, THE STORY GRID What Good Editors Know, is on sale at Black Irish Books. On Friday the book goes out to the…

A week from now is the official launch of Shawn’s terrific and much-anticipated new book, The Story Grid. I’m gonna use today’s post to describe one way that I employ Shawn’s principles when I work. Right now I’m on the sixth draft of a fiction project. (In other words, NOT the first draft, which goes by completely different rules.) When I start to work each morning I open onscreen five files: 1. The actual draft I’m working on. 2. A file I call Scene By Scene. 3. Culls (meaning everything I’ve cut). 4. A file I call MissingMissingMissing. 5. Conventions…

[The blog is hors de combat this week, as we prep for the launch of Shawn’s wonderful new book, THE STORY GRID, coming in a couple of weeks. Here’s one of my fave posts from a couple of years ago:] In the past year or so I’ve become aware of the verb “ask” used as a noun. I simultaneously like it and am appalled by it. An “ask” is a request for an action or a favor. I was reporting the contents of a long e-mail to a friend; she interrupted: “What’s the ask?” Meaning, “What does the e-mail writer…