Jeff Haws

Independent author

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Earn Your Plot: Be Shyamalan, not Shyamalan

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Plot twist

I wrote recently about the worst thing you can say about my fiction writing, which would be that I’m letting what I want to happen in the story drive my characters’ actions, rather than my characters’ wants, desires and personality driving what happens in the story. There’s little that frustrates me more in a story than when the author appears to be forcing her characters to behave in a way that seems unnatural in order to move the story forward, and the author doesn’t earn his own plot development. [Read more…] about Earn Your Plot: Be Shyamalan, not Shyamalan

And So the Writing Begins …

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Start

Writing begins on my first book this week, and I’m excited about getting it going. This is sort of Stage 3 of the process of getting this thing done.

Stage 1 was just reading. That’s it. Admittedly, I hadn’t read much of any fiction in several years, concentrating my energy largely on news writing since, well, that’s what I was writing. I felt like I needed to keep reading different writers in that style, continuing to pick up style notes, new ideas and influences that could help me improve. That’s what you do, right? But, about six months ago, I decided this was a shift in focus I wanted to make, from non-fiction to fiction. And I’ve got a good friend, Stan Mitchell — a terrific and successful author already — who encouraged me to make it, probably because he thinks I’m better at this writing thing than I am. Whether I’ll be any damn good at fiction is yet to be seen. [Read more…] about And So the Writing Begins …