Seven Questions To Ask To Improve a Scene (or an Entire Novel)
Or you could just add Taylor Kinney. There are seven questions you can ask your about your book before you begin to write it, which will make it a stronger book. Those questions work best if you ask them before you actually sit down to write. Now, if you're like me, and sitting in front of a computer with a finished or progressing manuscript, these questions might frustrate you--it's a little too late to change the stakes of your entire novel. It's not too late to help strengthen the novel scene by scene , however. As you know, I'm a strong proponent of the idea that strong scenes make a stronger book . I've blogged on this before. (I label each draft of my novel with a letter of the alphabet, and I usually get to those squiggly ones near the end. This is undoubtedly excessive. But as you can see, I obsess over making my scenes awesome.) So look at each scene individually and ask yourself these seven questions: 1. How can I raise the stakes? There are ...