Jackson Dean Chase - Post-Apocalypse Writers Phrase Book

Table of Contents CONTENTS Do You Crave Danger and Excitement? Get a FREE 4-Book Starter Library now when you join my Readers' Group ! You also get FREE access to my members-only Facebook group where you can chat with me and fans just like you! Thank you for downloading this book and I hope to see you in my Readers' Group soon! P.S.: I'd love it if you left a review of this book and mentioned it on your social media to help others discover me. Thank you! DEAD-ICATION To everyone who wished the world would end. Now it can! PREFACE We've all wished for the world to end. Not to die, but for a chance to start overto wipe the slate clean. The reality of that wish coming true might not be so romantic, and hardly ideal. The beautiful part of being an author is we get to safely destroy and remake the world every time we start a new story.

We get to remake ourselves. That's an amazing thing, a rare and wonderful gift. No doubt you're eager to share your exciting vision of the future but are having trouble expressing it. The Post-Apocalypse Writers' Phrase Book can help! This book isn't intended to replace your creativity, but to inspire it. The Horror Writers' Phrase Book was a #1 Amazon Hot New Release and bestseller, and I've taken what I learned and applied it to serve the apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, dystopian, prepper and zombie genres with a touch of cyberpunk thrown in for good measure. Admittedly, the contemporary or near-future setting of these genres requires a lot of overlap with the Horror book.

If you're writing mostly general horror fiction, that book may be more versatile. But if you're focusing on writing stories like Divergent , Mad Max , or The Walking Dead , this is the one for you. There are about sixty pages of unique content in this book that are not shared with the Horror Writers' Phrase Book. (Future Writers' Phrase Books will have less overlap as we move to other time periods or different worlds altogether.) So what's new in this volume? Futuristic weapons, plus stun guns, tranquilizer guns, and Tasers. Looting and scavenging. Radiation Sickness.

More ruined locations. Doomsday scenarioseverything from alien invasions to nuclear war to The Rapture. Different societies are explored, from anarchy to utopia. You get new monsters (including robots) plus more people: not just cannibals, crazies, and cultists, but cyborgs, soldiers, and all kinds of survivors you can use to help flesh out your stories. Sound good? Then strap on your gas mask, hop in your bomb shelter, and let's get started! Jackson Dean Chase INTRODUCTION I'm going to tell you a secret: A lot of what you write isn't what you say, it's how you say it. Sure, characters, story structure, and dialogue are important.

There are a ton of books written on those subjects for a reason. But you could be an expert in all those things and still fail to tell a compelling story. Why? Well, to be a truly great writer, you must constantly find new ways to say the same old things. Let's say you're writing a novel about a ragtag band of survivors desperately fleeing flesh-eating zombies. How many different ways can you think of to describe killing a zombie or being killed by one? Or of scavenging supplies? What about the ruined cities, the weather, the wildlife? Remember, these things are going to come up dozens of times and you've got hundreds of pages to fill! It doesn't matter if you're writing the next Dawn of the Dead , Escape from New York , or The Hunger Games . Sooner or later, you'll find yourself writing the same descriptions over and over.

And you'll agonize over each and every one, wondering how to inject new energy into them. But what if you didn't have to? What if you had an entire book of ready-made tags to inspire you at a moment's notice? TAGYOU'RE IT! Wait! What are tags, you ask? Tags are short descriptive phrases peppered between the dialogue and strung throughout the narrative. Done with skill, the reader never notices them, but their dramatic resonance is deeply felt. Trust me, your readers will notice if they're missing or not up to snuff! Consider the difference between saying, He glared at her and she became afraid, or His gaze burned with such intensity she felt her soul shiver. Which one do you prefer? Which is creepier and more exciting? Sure, both get the author's point across, but the second is more likely to leave the reader breathless and scrambling to turn the page. Tags are like bullets.

They are the greatest weapons in a writer's arsenal. The more you have, the more firepower you can bring to bear, blasting boring lines to bits and breathing new life into even the most mundane characters and situations. INSTANTLY WRITE BETTER FICTION Great fiction requires building the right atmosphere to create an emotional connection to the reader. Without one, why would anyone care if tough guy Snake Samson gets trapped in the ruins of old Manhattan by an army of mutant cyborgs? He'd just be human hamburger like so many cardboard characters in bad novels and B-movies. But if you can get inside Snake's head and really feel what it's like to be him, you can make the reader love him, fear for him, and pray he survives the fight. In the best fiction, whether you make Snake a throwaway victim in the prologue or the hero herself, he becomes a stand-in for readers to project themselves into and identify with.

Readers want to feel his fear, his isolation, the sense of impending doom hanging over him as all hope seems lost. That is what turns what might have been a cheap gore scene into a moment of grueling terror and suspense. So how do we make our example character more meaningful? We assign Snake's thoughts, words, and actions greater power with every tap of our keyboard. In short, we punch him up with tags. And we do the same for the mutants. And everyone else who matters.

But use your intuition. Not every line needs to be punched-up. After all, sometimes it's perfectly fine (and even more dramatic in a minimalist sense) to say, He shot him, instead of The bullet blazed through bone, spattering brains in a crimson mist. Nor is it wise for every act, thought or description to be over-the-top or made to stick out unnecessarily. But when you want to really emphasize something, to build atmosphere and heighten emotion, nothing beats a well-written tag. Use them right, use them well, and your stories will never be the same.

HOW DO I USE THIS BOOK? At the very least, just flipping through these pages should jumpstart your creative juices, especially if you've come down with a bad case of writer's block. You can use the tags as writing prompts to help you generate new scenes or even entire stories, but the most common method is to use them as quick fill in the blanks whenever you need a line. You have my permission to copy them as is, or customize them however you like. Some tags are more specific than others, so you may find it helpful to swap out whatever doesn't work with whatever you need. For example, changing the gender of the character or type of weapon or action is easily done, as is replacing the generic pronouns given with your character's names or some other vivid description instead (e.g., changing the man to the cruel killer). You can achieve a variety of exciting effects by mixing and matching tags (or parts of tags) from the same or different categories to create new ones.

Say you need to describe Snake seeing a zombie for the first time and your mind draws a blank. Simply flip to the Doomsday Menace section, then to Zombies. Scan the listed tags until you find one you like, then use it as is or challenge yourself to rewrite it in your own style, or use it as a creative springboard to come up with your own completely original tags. For example, you could combine It moaned and moved toward me, moldy lips peeling back from broken gums, and A blood-caked abomination crawled into view, its lower half gone, to become A blood-caked abomination moved toward Snake. So you not only have all the individual tags as written, but you also have an incredible number of combinationsa number limited only by your imagination. There's no wrong way to use this book except not to use it all.