Anna Bendewald
Hudson-Ivy Press

  How To Write a Balanced Book What is balance in a story? It's easier to say what an unbalanced story feels like. It feels off. It can be many things that cause a story to be unbalanced. Sub-plots that are left forgotten only to pop up and try hog the limelight. A dearth of information only to then pour out in a torrent of explanation known as the dreaded 'info dump'. Or pacing that drags along paying needless attention to pointless minutiae only to race through big plot points or gloss over critical interactions. As a writer, you must always think like a reader. What do they love most of all? To feel smart and involved. Don't get them involved in a sub-plot without making it worth their while. Keep that sub-plot alive and in its proper place--supporting the overall story experience. As for information, there are many ways to sprinkle clues and information throughout. Trust your reader to pick up on them so that when all is revealed, they've gathered everything all...

  How to Write a Book: Plotting First, you may ask, why not just let the story flow? It'll naturally have a beginning, middle, and end. Isn't anything else contrived? To that I ask: Q: Are you a unicorn who has stories flow out of your fingertips in the same sequence that they'll ultimately land in print? A: If you're not that unicorn, you will need a bit of contrivance to craft the plot of your story. There are so many different ways to plot a book, and I've tried them all. But ultimately I realized I was trying for a perfectly balanced experience... like Carl Gottleib's script for Jaws. If you've ever read The Jaws Log you'll know Carl was contriving so hard during the 159 days he was "co-writing" Jaws he probably looked like an interpretive dancer there on Martha's Vineyard while crafting the perfect 3 Act experience. And what an experience!  Act One: Grizzly murders with the town in peril Act Two: Heroes set out only to find they need a...

  How To Write a Book: Is Pacing Important? YES! A book that lags is a book that gets set aside. While long ago people were so enthralled to get their hands on a book that they were content to read it while it was chained to the wall in a library, nowadays we have so many commitments and distractions fighting for our attention that even the juiciest book has to compete with the nagging voice, “Did I turn the iron off?” and once you set a book down to check the iron, there are a bazillion things that come to mind and fight to keep you from returning to that story.  Q: What is this force that seeks to thwart authors and compel readers to stop reading? A: The Pre-Frontal Cortex Yes, this wonder of the human brain that sits just behind our foreheads is designed to do a wide variety of prioritizing from behavior to goals to calibrating emotional responses and complex organization for task completion. And when you stop reading a book your PFC blinks into life and starts trying to "h...

  How To Write a Book: Dating  No. I don't mean the romantic type of dating. I mean setting your story in an era or time. Sometimes it's critical to do so, and other times you may want to leave the era as timeless or vague. When setting your story in another era, you'll want to research what inventions were in use and strive for accuracy because you don't want readers to catch mistakes and ridicule you for it.* In this day and age with technology evolving at a dizzying pace, have a care about naming an app, a device or service. I'm old enough to remember rotary or button-dial phones that were tethered to wall outlets and we had to perform actions like dialing and hanging up our calls. You Gen-Alphas (or Zoomers) can find an old movie online to see what I'm talking about. But I found myself wondering how to write the interaction of a phone call in my first book. Now the actions performed are scrolling and tapping or ending or disconnecting. Now with Alexa drop-in...