Learn how to use word choice, syntax, and dialect in dialogue to create realistic characters with examples from Tana French's The Searcher.

See how Tana French uses sentence style, summary, and suspense to pull readers into the first chapter of The Searcher.

Why and how can you use multiple point-of-view narration in your novel? We’ll analyze NK Jemisin’s The City We Became to find out.

What are the benefits and drawbacks to including a prologue in your novel? We’ll examine the prologue to N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became to find out.

A close look at the messages readers get from the title, cover, epigraph, and illustration of NK Jemisin’s The City We Became.

How Patchett uses a shuffled chronology to tell a story that is also about the act of telling stories.

Sometimes your scene objectives require telling rather than showing. Discover how you can make telling dynamic.

In the opening of The Dutch House, Ann Patchett strategically opens story questions, provides layers of narration, and makes setting details do double duty to draw in readers.

In which we see why Anne is the most Virgo of all of Austen's characters.

Austen lets Mrs. Smith say the quiet parts out loud.

Austen shows us what a difference the perfect setting can make.

The river of the plot is about to carry us to the end.

Austen's novels ostensibly end with a happy marriage, but does she ever depict one?

A new character comes on the scene to set up our final plot twist.

Austen turns up the suspense on two long-simmering subplots.

Watch Austen trash her characters as only she can.

A close reading of how Austen uses the slipperiness of omniscient narration to her advantage.

Austen stitches the broken thread of her plot back into the narrative.

Austen twists the plot and shows her characters their true selves.

Just because race is occluded in Persuasion, that doesn't mean it isn't present.