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Books by D.J. Butler
Category Archives: How to Write
You Need to Read a Lot
For various reasons: To know your market, both the classics and the current hits. What is successful with the audience you are trying to reach? What fails? What has not been tried yet, and should be? What has only been … Continue reading
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Brainstorm Document: the Chronicles of Surfer Dude
Surfer Dude fights evil. What kind of evil will he fight? Could be coastal bases of evil natural/human enemies, like COBRA. Or he could defend goodguy coastal forts, that works for a surfer, but it makes him passive. What about … Continue reading
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Starting from a Blank Page
My experience is that you get one thing free from the Muses. After that, it’s all work. Okay, that’s accurate for a piece of writing as short as a song, but an exaggeration for a novel-length piece of writing. Still, … Continue reading
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Know Thyself: Abstract Plots
Another problem I have is that I tend to conjure up, as a first effort, characters with abstract needs or needs readers do not naturally relate to, e.g. strong devotions to principle or needs to grow. (This may have something … Continue reading
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What Kinds of Problems?
What sorts of problems / needs / objectives should your characters have? To some extent, the answer to this question is genre-driven. In a mystery, the detective needs to find out who done it. In a thriller, the protagonist must … Continue reading
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Know Thyself: Novelist’s Gearshift
Self-knowledge is key for a writer. One reason (of many reasons) it’s so important is that knowing your weaknesses is a necessary first step towards overcoming them. One of my own weaknesses (or, optimistically, “features”) as a writer is something … Continue reading
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Basic Plot Failure: the Deus ex Machina
It is especially bad writing to have your protagonist win because someone else just makes him win at the end. This is called a deus ex machina, which is fancy-pants talk for “someone or something else just makes your protagonist … Continue reading
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The Indiana Jones Rule
Other characters can have all kinds of luck, good, bad and ugly, but your main character, your protagonist, in all things that matter, can only have bad luck. This follows from yesterday’s post and foreshadows tomorrow’s.
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Basic Plot Failure: Passive Main Characters
The basic plot of a novel consists of a main character trying to accomplish some genre-appropriate task (save the kingdom, solve the crime, stop the bomb, overcome obstacles to love, whatever). It follows that one basic way in which a … Continue reading
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The Man with the Plan
The basic structural building block of any novel is a character who wants something and acts to get it. The account of what happens when that character acts to get what he wants is the plot, if the character is … Continue reading
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