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EXCLUSIVE "Write As We Go" Coaching Program If you have a work-in-progress you might prefer to send me a few chapters at a time. That way you can consider my suggestions as you write the following chapters. We can work together as the story grows, and you can pick your own pace and pay as you go. Click here for details on this and other services.

Problems:
Create formidable obstacles and setbacks along your character's path. Include both inner conflicts that plague the main characters and outer conflicts that keep them on their toes.

Friends and Enemies:
Fantasy novels, more than other genres, involve important and pivotal relationships with other characters, human or otherwise.

Sense of Reality:
Make your setting and details totally believable. Make them such a natural and real part of your character's life that we sense this make-believe world is real too.

Emotions:
Action alone will not hold a reader's attention. Human emotions, whether they involve gothic, medieval, space-age, or outer-space environments, or whether they are expressed by dragons or robots, are the backbone of what makes a fantasy story ring true to readers.

2. Revise, revise, revise.
Create your alternate world realities using vivid and detailed specifics that will ring true for readers.

3. Get professional editing.
Yes, this is a plug for my services, but it is true: Professional editing services can help you grow as a writer in ways that studying books could never do. I take your own plot, characters, and ideas and review them with an eye to marketability. Then I address your own strengths and help you bolster your weaker spots to create the strong story that you want. Interested? Click here to see more about my services.

Donald writes, “While I was writing my story, I read in the newspaper of a thirteen-year-old boy who had taken his own life after suffering for years in school with the same sort of problems my young character does. Thus, my story is dedicated to the memory of that child, and to all who presently endure much the same--for whatever specific reasons--and are too ashamed and proud to ask for help, instead of desperately trying to hide it from their families and friends.

“Thank you again, Ms. Haven. The most important and valuable aspect of writing that I learned from you is how to recognize and eliminate excess verbiage and redundancies in expression. I remain most appreciative. Thank you very much." --- Donald Schneider, from Philadelphia, PA

Editor's Note: Thanks, Eli, for the nice mention on your Acknowledgments page! It was a pleasure working with you.