Lots of amazing worldbuilding links, since they inspired many of my thoughts in my last post. Be sure to check them out, as well as the other writing posts I found thought-provoking or helpful:
WORLDBUILDING & SETTING
- Sherwood Smith at Book View Cafe wrote an insightful and in-depth post about worldbuilding, internal consistency, and things that pull her out of the reading experience. Definitely made me want to write a secondary world that's logical, despite how much work it is!
- Steven Popkes, also at Book View Cafe, applies evolution to the movie Avatar and comes up with some interesting conclusions. Great thoughts about how flora and fauna of your world should make evolutionary sense.
- Juliette Wade posted a TTYU retro about how descriptions should have relevant support structures. Love her points about keeping the viewpoint character in mind and slipping in the worldbuilding subtly.
CRAFT
- Kristen Lamb uses the acronym LOCK to help writers test the strength of their story ideas. This showed me that I need to give some more thought to what my protagonist really wants.
- Janice Hardy provides some great tips on maintaining believability. Nothing is more jarring than implausible plot points or character decisions.
- Alicia Rasley at Edittorrent talks about how drawing out a scene can increase the emotional payoff. I think it'd be great for surprises, too.
PLOT
- I adore the INTERN's posts on breaking down The Hunger Games! I love that book and I enjoyed reading her analysis of what makes the book so addicting. Part one is about structure on the sentence/scene/chapter level, and part two is about video games (yes, really).
DIVERSITY
- Kate Hart does an amazing job of creating cool info-graphics to analyze the covers of 2010 YA novels in her post, Uncovering YA Covers: How Dark Are They? The answer to her question? Not very. In fact, they tend to be overwhelmingly white. I'm hoping there will be more diversity in YA in the future!
That's it for this time. Have a great weekend!
Oh man, lots of great sites in this list that I didn't know about. Thanks, Linda!
ReplyDeleteNo problem! Glad you enjoyed them. :) I love finding awesome new sites in
ReplyDeleteother people's link roundups, too!
OMG. That YA cover diversity issue pissed the pants off me. And I've actually heard of the LOCK convention in James Scott Bell's Revision and Self-editing, which is a little puzzling... but as usual, AMAZING round-up, Linda.
ReplyDeleteThanks! Yeah, that's why we have to do our best to write amazing books
ReplyDeletefeaturing people of color, get those published, then refuse to let the
covers get white-washed. :) Oh yeah and Kristen Lamb says in her post that
the LOCK concept is from James Scott Bell's book, haha.
Oh RIGHT, I seem to recall that in Revision and Self-editing James Scott Bell said he borrowed from his other book. Well that cleared things up a bit. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteThanks for including me! :)
ReplyDeleteThank YOU for the awesome blog post! :)
ReplyDelete