Craft
12 posts on craft, newest first.
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Craft Conan Doyle Used “Upon” 465 Times: Overused Words in Fiction The filler words fiction editors cut first, real counts from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and how to find your own habits without reading the whole draft again. -
Craft How Many Words Should a Chapter Be? Typical chapter lengths in novels by genre, why there's no rule, and how to tell whether one of your chapters is too long or too short for the book around it. -
Craft How Long Should a Novel Be? Word Counts by Genre The word-count ranges agents and readers actually expect (fantasy, romance, thriller, YA, literary), and what to do if you're way over or under. -
Craft A Series Bible for Book Two and Beyond What a series bible holds that a single book's notes don't, how to start one when you're already a book in, and how to carry it into the next book. -
Craft Sending Your Novel to Beta Readers When to send a draft out, how many readers you actually need, the brief that gets useful answers, what file to send, and why every copy should carry the reader's name. -
Craft A Character Sheet That's Actually Useful (With a Real Example) Why 100-question character templates don't help, what a working character sheet holds instead, and a filled-in example for Irene Adler from A Scandal in Bohemia. -
Craft What a Style Sheet Is, and Why Your Copyeditor Will Ask for One What goes on a novel's style sheet (spellings, names, hyphenation, numbers, timeline), why copyeditors make one for every book, and why it's worth starting your own while you draft. -
Craft Continuity Errors in Fiction, and How to Catch Them The continuity mistakes that get into published novels (Conan Doyle made two famous ones), the four kinds to check for, and how to catch them before a reader does. -
Craft How to Keep Character Names Consistent Across a Whole Book Why character names drift over a long draft, the find-and-replace traps when you rename someone, and how to check every spelling and nickname before a reader does. -
Craft What Is a Story Bible, and Do You Need One? The reference document that keeps names, timelines and world details consistent across a novel or a series, what goes in it, and when you need one. -
Craft Should Your Novel Have a Prologue? Why agents are wary of prologues, the kinds that work, and how a prologue, epilogue and interlude should be numbered and laid out in a printed book. -
Craft A Self-Editing Checklist for Your Novel A self-editing checklist for a finished draft, in the order that saves you work: structure first, then scenes, then sentences, then the mechanical copyedit.