A distinctive voice can add a charming or compelling aspect to a story.  What is voice?  And do we need a distinctive voice?  Maybe not, maybe so.  Here are thoughts about a voice for our stories.  Also mentioned are ideas and techniques regarding flashbacks.

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The words on our page should be a clear window to our story.   How can we do that?  Here are eleven techniques to make our sentences forceful and clear.   Also, some comments on the story arc.   What is a story arc?  Is the concept useful?

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A literary agent or a publisher may ask for a synopsis of our novel, a three to five-page summary.  Here are techniques on how to write one.  Also, can artificial intelligence write fiction?  We'll find out.  Plus, ridding our sentences of filters to get the reader closer to the scene.

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New writers tend to put too much summary into their stories.  I'll talk about how to avoid that mistake, making sure that most of our novels are scenes.   Why is this so important?   Scenes are much more engaging for the reader than are summaries.   Also, here's how to show--rather than tell--about our characters' aches and pains.   And here's a list of the twelve best novels of all time.

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A great pleasure in our fiction reading is coming across a dastardly villain, someone so bad and so well-described we will never forget him or her.  Hannibal Lecter.  Nurse Ratched.  Huckleberry Finn's father Pap.   How can writers create such a villain?  Here are techniques, in particular regarding the physical description of the villain.   Also discussed is how we can get unstuck in our plotting or writing.

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Here are two errors we might make when describing our setting.  First, using a dull setting.  And, second, making the setting inert, that is, not having the setting contribute to the story.   Here are techniques to avoid both mistakes.  Plus, we'll look at how other novelists get to work each day, how they manage to sit themselves down and start writing.

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Once we have completed our novel, it may be time to obtain the services of a literary agent.  Here are thoughts on how to find good ones, and how to write a query asking them to look at your manuscript 

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Blue is bluer when placed next to yellow.  Here are techniques on the use of contrast to make our scenes and characters more vivid.  Also, we can learn how to describe characters--and we can be inspired--by reading how the masters create their characters.

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Here are some thoughts about how we can write our story in the first-person, some techniques that will capture the reader.   Also, usually the fewer the adverbs and adjectives, the stronger the writing.  Here's how we can reduce the number of modifiers in our fiction.  And here's a list of the six funniest novels of all time.

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One of the best ways to learn the craft of fiction is to read the works of great writers, those novelists who know how to offer the reader unforgettable images of new places and new people.   Here are examples of character and setting descriptions from skilled writers.   Listening to them, we'll be inspired to create vivid and enchanting descriptions

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