Novelists, here are some blogs that will help you begin, organize and revise your novel.

Get Your Novel Off to a Great Start

5 Tips to Make Your Novel Opening a Strong One
You might have as few as five pages to impress readers of your novel. Read more.

2 Writing Teachers Talk About Giving Your Novel a Great Start
Recognize right from the start that the opening of your novel is going to take multiple revisions in order to get it right. It’s going to take work. Editing. Taking the time to think through those fundamental decisions about what makes your character and plot tick will make your book so much stronger later on. Read more.

Use Research, Imagination & Emotion to Build Your Novel
There’s something mysterious about the way the passion you feel in your mind and heart gets transferred onto the page. It doesn’t seem like a reader should be able to tell how I feel as I write, but over and over again, I’ve seen the results. When I am deeply emotional about a scene, it works. Read more.

Organizing & Revising Your Novel

Shrink Your Manuscript, by Darcy Pattison
Writing a great scene is easy. A novel, however, adds layer after layer of complexity until it’s hard to keep everything straight. What novelists need is a simple way to take the abstract and make it visual. Writing teacher Darcy Pattison uses the “shrunken manuscript” technique to visualize a novel’s narrative arc, the emotional journey and much more. Read more.

Who, What, Where, and Usually Why: Revising Scenes, by Sage Blackwood
When I draft and revise my novels, I divide them into scenes. A scene is a capsule of story. It’s usually one sequence of action, in one setting, in one moment of time. When time and place have changed, that’s a new scene. Here are some things I look for when revising a scene. Read more.

Writing for #kidlit Genres

5 Tips to Create Unforgettable Middle Grade or Young Adult Historical Fiction, by Ashley Hope Pérez
Here are a few strategies that can help you coordinate your efforts to build an unforgettable world and an unforgettable story in your fiction. Read more.

The Opening of Your Novel Has a Lot of Work to Do, by Erin Dionne
Erin promises she can help! Read more.

The Verse Novel: If I Can Do It, So Can You, by Kathryn Erskine
I’ve come to realize that the vehicle for delivering a story is critical. Even a joke packs more punch if you get the timing right. Some stories crave the picture book format. Some require a novel. Read more.