Noah Lukeman's advice

I should've posted this yesterday. Sorry. I'm sure everyone's as busy as I am. I'll try to post on time next week.

My current carpool waiting line book is Noah Lukeman's The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life. I'm not finished reading it yet. I'm reading slowly because it makes me think about the stories I'm writing.

I liked the excercises on pages 78-80. Some of them were common sense ideas that I'd read and think: Why didn't I already come up with that? It takes time to go through the whole manuscript and pick out slow parts to beef up with more action or emotion, pull out a character, put in a different character, create more dissonance to work through.

Conflict is necessary for interest. But satisfying a reader takes more than giving your character a hard time and letting him get the victory at the end. There are surface journeys and profound journeys. Lukeman brought up thoughts in me that help draw more intricately detailed pictures of my characters' journeys.

Much of the book is question after question. But they're the right questions. Each author answers them differently for each of his stories.

Every author should own this book.