Hi, My Name Is…
Sometimes, our characters pop into life with the exact right name. Other times, we have only a vague idea what to call them and...
Creating Characters at Mach-IV
In a new post, Kristen Lamb takes a left turn at traditional "personality tests" to discuss how to discover what makes your characters tick....
Practice for Making Your Characters Distinct
In a new post, Mary Carroll Moore offers advice on making each of your story's characters distinct. "Developed characters, fictional or real, should be...
Open Doors in Your Writing
We share a lot of writing prompts here, many of them unconventional or genre-specific. Many prompts from the outside world are either too broad...
Some Days, You Don’t Need a Goal
Word counts, daily hours, publication, awards. Writers fret about a lot of things, most of them out of our control, many of which rob...
Hide Your Villain Behind the Green Herring
Of course, mystery writers are familiar with the concept of a red herring - a clue that is really a misdirection, distracting the reader...
Just Write
A lot of beginning writers struggle with basic writing concepts, including...beginning. Should we write a premise first? Flesh out our characters? Describe all our...
She Killed It: What Stand-Up Taught This Writer about Fear
In a post on CrimeReads, Erica Ferencik says years of performing as a stand-up comic taught her a lot about writing thrillers, because even...
What’s Your Weapon of Opportunity?
In the latest in her series of Fight Write™ posts on the Writer's Digest blog, trained fighter and author Carla Hoch discusses weapons of...
What’s Really at Earth’s Core
The Sun is an appropriate venue for baffling news: On February 24, the paper reported that scientists are puzzled by the discovery of new...
