LAURENCE MACNAUGHTON

  • Have you ever wondered… … how writers deal with reviews, both good and bad? … what kind of mistakes beginning writers often make? … where writers get their ideas? I’m doing an Ask Me Anything (AMA) event on Wednesday, May…

  • One day, almost exactly 10 years ago, I walked into a bookstore in Hawaii and discovered something fascinating. It was an overly large magazine, with big glossy pages that flopped over in the humid air, and it was chock-full of…

  • Sooner or later, every story runs into a little hiccup. As you write, you’ll discover that certain facts don’t fit together anymore. Maybe a character needs to be changed or removed. Maybe you find a plot hole big enough to…

  • While I was writing No Sleep till Doomsday (Dru Jasper series, book 3), much to my surprise, I found myself listening to a certain Ukrainian pop music album over and over. Here’s why. My book features an evil crystal sorceress named…

  • “Show, Don’t Tell” is probably the most often-repeated writing advice in the world. It means that you shouldn’t dump a load of information in the middle of the page, because it will stop your story dead. But it’s easy to…

  • I’ve talked to hundreds of best-selling authors about their early years, before they were published. By and large, they wrote about half a dozen unpublished manuscripts before they sold their “first” novel. Aside from cranking out thousands of pages of…

  • This is a true story. Not long ago, an aspiring writer reached out to me for advice on how to deal with the worst kind of rejection. Delia (not her real name) had decided once and for all to finally…

  • Have you ever read a book that you just couldn’t put down? The whole time you were turning pages, you were probably desperate to discover the answer to a burning question. That’s the essence of suspense, and it makes readers…

  • There’s only one thing I love more than discovering a new bookstore, and that’s meeting new readers. Independent bookstores tend to attract some of the smartest and most interesting people around. It’s true. Every time I do a book signing,…

  • Believe it or not, it’s easy to write gripping action scenes—if you know how. In Part 1 of this article, I showed you how to break down complicated action scenes into their component parts: location, characters, goals, and actions. Now I’ll…

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…