Literary agent Donald Maass shares what it takes to succeed in as novelist.
Career Patterns That Work
In this excerpt from Career Patterns That Work from Donald Maass’s The Breakout Novelist, you’ll learn:
- How to get off to a good start
- How to answer the...
Worksheets for The Breakout Novelist
The Breakout Novelist
From Donald Maass's book The Breakout Novelist learn:- Get expert craft advice (from beginner to advanced) and insider career advice
- Build your skills with over 70...
Exercise: Defining Personal Stakes
Without personal stakes, even the highest-voltage thriller can read like an empty plot exercise. Raise the personal stakes, and we will all care what happens in your story, whether the plot is boiling or not.
Exercise: Capturing the Moment of Irrevocable Commitment
Is there a moment of ultimate stakes in your current manuscript? If not, you need to fix it on the page to ensure that your hero’s testing and eventual commitment will be fixed in your readers’ minds for a long time to come.
Exercise: Raising Public Stakes
How far do the public stakes in your novel-in-progress rise? How deep do they cut? How bad do they get? Take them higher and deeper. Make them worse—much worse. Your novel can only get better.
The Passion in Prose (And What That Really Means)
What is it in a novel that sweeps us away? To put it differently, when we are transported while reading fiction, what is it on the page that actually produces that effect? In a word, I believe it is this: passion.
The 3 Key Types of “Stakes” that Drive Novels
Raising the stakes, whether they arise from internal forces or from external ones, makes your protagonist’s character interesting and her story memorable. Here are 3 key ways to do that.
by Donald Maass
by Donald Maass
How to Channel Passion in Your Writing
Transposing your own powerful feelings, opinions, joys and sadness to your characters, every day, is the way to instill in your pages the wisdom that is living inside your novel—and you.
by Donald Maass
by Donald Maass
4 Techniques to Fire Up Your Fiction
Here are some exercises to apply to your novel-in-progress. They are designed to dig up what matters in your story and infuse it in your manuscript in effective—but not obvious—ways.
by Donald Maass
by Donald Maass