dawn.vogel | April 29, 2024
Before There Were Stars is a little different from most of the card-based writing tools I use. It’s designed to be a storytelling game rather than writing prompts, but the way the game is set up, it works well as both! In the game, you tell mythic stories about a fictional group of people, based […]
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 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 | September 7, 2020
We recently watched Bill and Ted Face the Music, as Jeremy and I are both huge fans of the original Bill and Ted movies. And while we enjoyed the most recent entry into this franchise, we both agreed that it paled in comparison to the previous movies. The biggest problem that we identified was that […]
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 | 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 | August 4, 2017
As a bit of fun for this Friday, I found an interesting post that talks about adding layers to your plot. I am particularly intrigued by the Donald Maass workshop exercise, because I LOVE random things. So the idea of randomly drawing lines between characters, narrative elements, and places to see what might shake loose is […]
