It's The Execution, Stupid

No, no. I’m not talking about frying criminals. This blog is supposed to be about writing, remember?

So, you’ve done the homework. Learned about passive voice, 3-dimensional characters, ratcheting up the stakes, black moments, hooks, GMC, POV, themes, and all the rest.

But have you learned how to translate what you’ve learned? Has the knowledge made that arduous trip from your brain to the paper?

Fit For Love’s heroine is a slacker who finds herself trapped at a boot camp for fitness freaks. I deliberately avoided committing to whether she was thin, fat, or somewhere in between because my point was that the men in her life (starting with her father) had managed to negatively influence her self-image. By the end of the story, her emotional growth derives from accepting herself for who she is.

Does that come across in the book?? Hm. I hope so, but maybe, maybe not.

Knowing the essential ingredients for a good story is one thing. Knowing how much of and in what order to drop them in the pot, how long to cook them and at what temperature is another. Let’s not even discuss how to figure out what the whole thing’s supposed to look like when it’s done.

Ah, yes. Execution. Just one more rung on the ladder toward publication.