Stronger Structure Can Save Your Muddy Middle
In a guest post on Writers Helping Writers, Jami Gold says that paying closer attention to traditional story structure can help you bolster a...
Please Don’t Call Me Beautiful
There's a fine line between "not enough" and "too much" that writers must tread in their fiction. Too many characters or too few? Too...
The Fine Line Between Real and Imagined in Historical Characters
When writing about real people in historical fiction, especially when an historical person is a main character, writers have to walk a fine line...
A Writer’s Greatest Super Power
If we got to choose, we'd probably find it easy to pick our superpower: flight, invisibility, mind-reading, time travel. If we were limited to...
Your Hero Has to Fail
In writing, as in life, the best lessons and the sweetest victories come after we fail. While we want our protagonist to succeed in...
Planning and Navigating Your Novel’s Muddy Middle
It's common wisdom that the middle section of your novel is the hardest part to write, especially when you're tackling your first long project...
The Difference Between Conflict and Tension
In a guest post on the Killzone blog, Becca Puglisi of the Writers Helping Writers blog discusses the difference between conflict and narrative tension.
Puglisi...
A Call to Action: Your Story’s Inciting Incident
Every story has to start somewhere. You can start with your protagonist waking up in the morning or looking at themselves in the mirror...
Blending Facts and Imagination in Historical Fiction
Writers who use historical settings or real-life characters in their work must walk a fine line between hewing too closely to biography and veering...
The Three R’s of Editing
Unless you're a rare genius or a sloppy typist who publishes your latest novel on Amazon the weekend after you finish writing it, you...