At Agile Writers we’ve been reading Sage Cohen’s book “Fierce on the Page.” Each week one of the writers will take the book home and read a chapter and digest it down to one page. Then, they return the next week and share what they learned and we talk about how it applies to our writing in general and what […]
At Agile Writers we’ve been reading Sage Cohen’s book “Fierce on the Page.” Each week one of the writers will take the book home and read a chapter and digest it down to one page. Then, they return the next week and share what they learned and we talk about how it applies to our writing in general and what […]
There are a number of ways to expose information to the reader: dialog, letters, news reports, and flashbacks are just a few. But by far the best way to expose information to the reader is to have someone close to the hero who doesn’t understand what is going on. I call this “the idiot in the room.” When you want […]
Star Wars has been a phenomenally popular movie franchise. The original Star Wars came out in 1977 and was an instant success. But when I first watched it, I was not impressed. My first impression was that it was the King Arthur legend in outer space. Even at the age of 14 I had expectations of my science fiction adventures. […]
At Agile Writers we adhere to The Hero’s Journey as laid out by Joseph Campbell in his seminal work The Hero With a Thousand Faces. We also take lessons from movie plots and combine them into the Agile Writer Method. The Hero’s Journey has a standard pattern. The hero starts out in a familiar world where things are pretty static. Then something […]
Recently at Agile Writers the topic of what is “allowed” in certain genres came up. In particular, a couple writers are working on Christian Inspirational fiction and wondered what words or topics were taboo. In that genre, readers are very sensitive to words that are perceived as “swear” words. Our own Cat Brennan related a story of how a Christian […]
One of the things I teach in my seminar on The Agile Writer Method is that the climax is the seventh and final turning point in the story. There is the classic climax where the hero defeats the villain and solves the main goal of the story. But there other ways to handle a climax. One of them is what I […]
By James Bono Twas the night before Thursday. Throughout Martins’ store Rishonda was browbeating us to write more. “Ten pages are sent every Sunday by peak agile writers. So how was your week?” Elevator pitches graced those who would dare, in hopes that Saint Gregory soon would be there. Each writer was nestled all snug in his seat while visions […]
“You don’t have to be a great grammarian or great speller to write a novel. You don’t have to have connections in the writing world. What you need is a passion for your story and a plan to complete. You bring the passion, we’ll bring the plan.” -Greg Smith (2011) Founder Agile Writers Creator of the Agile Writer Method
If you want to get your work out in the simplest possible way at the lowest possible cost, consider Smashwords.com. You put your lightly-formatted Microsoft Word document into their engine and it converts it to Apple iBook, Barnes&Noble Nook, Kobe, Sony, and many other formats. Then Smashwords will distribute the eBook to all the different publishers AND take in all […]