LAURENCE MACNAUGHTON

  • Encouragement is like chocolate. You want just enough to look forward to, but not so much it’s unhealthy. Right? So if someone tells you that you’re doing a great job, maybe you really are. Or maybe they’re just hoping you’ll…

  • Being a fictional hero is a pretty dangerous occupation. You could get shot at, chased, imprisoned, stranded in the wilderness — and that might be just in the first chapter. When heroes die in a story, it affects us. (Or…

  • There are little lies we tell ourselves all the time. “Oh, I’ll clean out the garage when I have some free time.” Or maybe, “This year, I’m really going to go to the gym twice a week. I mean it…

  • Like a lot of kids, I dreamed about flying. But it was never the actual “floating over the neighborhood” part that captured my imagination, looking down at everyone and waving. No, it was the sense of acceleration. The feeling of…

  • While I’m not a complete Luddite, I don’t usually write on a computer. There are times when a fleeting bit dialogue or description is looping through your mind, wrenching your emotions, and you need to get those ideas down on…

  • Most of the writers I know feel completely swamped. Between marketing, networking and a hundred other demands on your schedule (not to mention trying to actually live your life), there’s not a lot of time left to actually write. And…

  • Somebody asked me recently to recommend a good book about writing fiction. I stopped for a moment and realized that most of the writing books on my shelves are actually aimed at screenwriters, not novelists. Why is that? I love…

From the blog

  • Want to Get Published? Read This.

    I’ve talked to dozens of best-selling authors about their early years, before they were published. And the similarities between them are striking. On average, they wrote about half a dozen unpublished manuscripts before they sold a novel. (By the way, this is what I call the Myth of the First Novel. Because it’s hardly ever…

  • Compelling Character Arcs in 4 Easy Steps

    I’ll let you in on a secret: readers want your character to change. They know, deep down, that your character is unhappy with the status quo at the beginning of your book. Something is terribly wrong in your character’s life, and things can’t keep going on this way. Something’s got to give. Readers fervently hope…