Holy hotcakes, Batman! Check out the Great Stuff we’ve got today! The first three posts qualify as Extra-Great Stuff in my mind, and the others are none too shabby themselves. Check ‘em out.

CRAFT

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s excellent Your Story Opening: Shock vs. Seduction on Jane Friedman’s blog opens today’s Great Stuff, and what an opening it is. This excerpt from her book Fine-Tuning Fiction actually starts with a brief discussion of pace and who drives it—antagonist early, protagonist later—then gets into those two types of openings. The shock opening grabs the reader’s interest and attention right away...

Primarily a business focus in today’s articles but Kristen Lamb’s funny piece on not being a social media tools tool is a nice counterpoint.

CRAFT

James Scott Bell’s (@jamesscottbell) The Perils of Pure Pantsing on The Kill Zone could also be titled “In Praise of Structure.” Note that that’s structure with a u, not stricture with an i. Late in the post, Bell writes that structure “helps readers feel what you want them to feel” (italics his). I compare structure to the bare scaffold of a building. It defines the general shape but says nothing about where the doors and windows will be, the number, shape, or size of the rooms, or what the exterior will look like. That’s where the architect’s art comes in...

A while back several members of my critique group, the Cochise Writers’ Group, and I came up with a list of questions we could and should ask ourselves as we were reading each other’s work. We’ve shared it with other people but why keep the good stuff to ourselves?

So, without further ado, here’s an introduction to critique, “technique,” and “procedure.”

Read books, magazines, blogs, web sites, you-name-it on writing and you’ll be inundated, absolutely overwhelmed, with tips, tricks, hints, suggestions, ideas, and more on how to write everything from a poem to the Great American Novel, how to overcome writer’s block, how to ...

Whew! All caught up. Had a good weekend at the Tucson Festival of Books, but leaving the house before 6:15 in the morning and not getting back until late that night doesn’t leave much time for reading blogs or writing about them. No matter: we’re back on schedule.

CRAFT

“Motivation-reaction units.” Sounds like parts from a rocket engine, doesn’t it? Katie Weiland (@KMWeiland) says no, that phrase is just another way of describing the cause-and-effect sequence that defines each event in a story. The cause is some kind of outside stimulus. The effect is the reaction—well, three reactions, actually: feeling and/or thought, physical action, speech...

I hope you’re enjoying Great Stuff’s new home. I had a bit of a scare with it on Friday (web site launches are always a bit fraught anyway, so I shouldn’t have been surprised) but all ended well. There’s still more to do with the site but at least we’re up and running.

Today’s Great Stuff is full to overflowing, so I won’t hold you up any longer. Dive in!

CRAFT

You might not think that writing and lawyering have much in common (we’ll not get all snarky here), but lawyer and published novelist Tara Conklin (@TEConklin) makes the case for the commonalities—or case-preparation techniques—you can use to write more effectively in Write Like a Lawyer: 5 Tips for Fiction Writers. A few examples: create a timeline, interrogate your characters, and use only persuasive facts.

Jam...