Historical Fiction: When It’s Ok to Snoop in Someone’s Journal
In a new post on the A Writer of History blog, MK Tod says that private diaries and personal accounts can provide a rich...
Your Character’s Secrets and Scars Form Their Values
The key to taking your reader on an emotional journey is encouraging them to invest in your characters. If readers connect to your characters...
Use Strong Characters to Help Your Reader Jump to Conclusions
In a post on Writer Unboxed, Keith Cronin suggests writers explore and leverage the way people jump to first impressions when they meet someone...
It’s Gotta Be This or That
Strong narrative drive requires you to write about characters in action. The surest way to get your characters moving is to give them choices,...
La Plus Ça Change…
In their latest podcast, the Writing Excuses hosts discuss why writers of fantasy and science fiction allow their worlds to remain static. In our...
Advice on Developing Characters On Either Side of a Societal Conflict
As you grow as a writer, you might feel the need to tackle significant themes in your writing. Even many genre novels address topical...
Set Scenes by Thinking Like a Director
Continuing her series of articles on using cinematic techniques in prose, C.S. Lakin offers more specific advice on mastering this approach. "The more you...
Do You Know Your Character’s Backstory?
Your characters may first appear to your reader on page 1 of your story, but in their world, they've lived full lives before we...
He Said, She Said: Finding a Better Way to ID Characters...
Writers love to debate the use of dialogue tags. Some eschew them altogether. Some argue that "said" is the only acceptable attribution, while others...
The Ethics of Portraying Historical Persons
The beauty of writing fiction is that we create our own worlds and people them with characters whose personalities and fates we (mostly) control....
