Useful info from Debby… follow the link at the foot of the post for the full article.

I’m writing this post because it has come to my attention several times by some of my readers that they occasionally wanted to reblog some of my posts but commented that there was no ‘reblog‘ button on my page to share.As readers and writers, we are not all technically gifted and that little button makes it easy to share the blog instantly to your own blog. Unfortunately, when someone owns their own domain, that is, not having their blog on WordPress.com, they aren’t afforded the ability to add a ‘reblog‘ button from the plugins in their dashboards. When I first moved to my own site from WordPress, I had installed a plugin called ‘repost‘ to enable readers to copy my blog post over to their own blog. That button has since become invalid…

I’m no technical genius and when I first started blogging, I needed to learn my way around the WordPress system. It is pretty much common sense and easy enough to set up. If you get stuck, there are plenty of helpful articles and forums that show you how to do pretty much anything. Just type the question into your search engine.

The one thing they cannot do, though, is answer questions you didn’t know you should ask. Over the past few days I have become aware of how many of those little tweaks and tricks we learn about, then just take for granted. Reblogging was one area I found frustrating for a good while. It is a simple process, the press of a button, until the button is not there…

1. Can’t see the reblog button?
This took me ages to work out! Many blogs, including this one, have their…

A good story is basically “Somebody wanted something and they had to overcome an obstacle to get it.”

Without that… no story, really.

(The stories that really make readers do flip flops (in a good way) have surprises. The premise “nothing is as it appears” is an awesome storytelling device, and is the main underpinning of several of my stories. It’s a kick when Critique Partners go “Didn’t see that coming!” Do it when you can.)

So… let us begin at the beginning.

PLOT

Fred goes to the store.

That’s a story. Simple and effective, but not very interesting. Nobody’s reading that story. Because there’s no obstacle to overcome, and we said in a GOOD story they had to overcome OBSTACLES to get what they wanted. Fred wants something, yes. He has to go to the store to get it, so technically the distance between him and the store is…

Thursday we talked about how to make a good story. (Click HEREfor that.) Today we’ll go over a few do’s and don’ts.

Six of them, more or less.

1. What we tend to do as new writers is describe things that are not important, like the color of Fred’s car or details about his two-story, split level house.

Why do we do that? Well, to set the scene, but that stuff isn’t important unless the wolf (there was a wold attacking Fred on Thursday) only jumps into cars the color or Fred’s, or the fire department was told to rescue the kid in the yellow, two-story split level house – like they didn’t get an address.

I see this kind of mistake a lot.

I’ll usually ask “Do we need to know this?” and if so, “Do we need to know it right here?” Usually we don’t. Get rid of…