dawn.vogel | October 9, 2023
I’ve accumulated a large collection of card-based writing tools, each of which is useful to different parts of my writing process. So I’ve decided to do a series of posts about the various decks I own and how I use them in my writing. It’s been a while since I’ve added a new deck to […]
dawn.vogel | June 27, 2022
I’ve got outlining on the brain at the moment, as I frantically put one together for what was supposed to be a simple July project that grew into “no, put that idea down for a while and use this one”. The first idea required a bunch of research, which is done now, but also ate […]
dawn.vogel | June 20, 2022
How do you know when you’re at the end of your story? How do you wrap it all up neatly and put a bow on it? This article suggests ten different approaches to endings, which will resonate with different authors. For some of my stories, I definitely see the end when I get started. I […]
dawn.vogel | May 10, 2021
As a firm believer in writing to an outline, I’m always interested in seeing ways that other people approach writing their outlines. In this article, the author advocates for using comic script techniques for outlining. It looks like an interesting way to set up scenes for writing later, as they hit the various beats that […]
dawn.vogel | May 3, 2021
There’s a lot of writing advice out there in the world, and while there’s plenty that is just reiterating what’s been said dozens of of times before, you may also come across new-to-you pieces of advice. This has been happening to me a lot lately, as I’ve been reading writing craft books specific to structuring […]
dawn.vogel | September 17, 2018
I’ve spent the weekend working on a flash fiction story for a contest. The contest gives an assigned genre, location, and object, and when I read the ones I had been assigned, I groaned. It was a genre that I don’t write, read, or really enjoy. And that was a problem for me trying to […]
dawn.vogel | August 20, 2018
At SpoCon, Frances Pauli and I teamed up to run a writing workshop for teen writers. Frances did most of the work, arriving with some fantastic worksheets that let us put together an easy idea for a story right there! The worksheets were very close to the “Pixar formula”, which runs “Once upon a time […]
dawn.vogel | May 21, 2018
Last week, I talked about getting stuck in the middle of a story. A similar, and yet different problem can be when your story takes on a life of its own, and somehow falls off the edge of your map. Many folks who fall into the “pantsers” camp of writing insist that they just let […]
dawn.vogel | May 14, 2018
Last week, I talked about beginnings. Today, I’m thinking about what happens when you get stuck in the middle of the story. Sometimes, my stories grind to a halt around the middle when I’ve been writing for a while. Pinpointing the reason for this isn’t always easy, but for me, at least, I often find […]
dawn.vogel | January 9, 2018
As I’ve mentioned before, Scenes from a Quiet Apocalypse came out of the 2017 Write Like You’re Alive challenge from Zoetic Press. This also wound up informing the format for the story, too. See, I normally outline using Mark Teppo’s outline structure (which I’ve talked about before), which leads to an 18 chapter outline, with […]
