Strategic Authoring: Plan Like a Pro, Write Like a Rebel – Part 2
Welcome back to the Strategic Authoring series—where we combine the soul of an artist with the strategy of a professional to help you write with purpose, consistency, and joy. In the first installment, we focused on building a strong foundation: identifying your why, defining what success truly looks like for you, and reverse-engineering your story […]
Turning Points & Plot Goals
If you’ve been in the writing community for a while, you may have heard of plot turns, turning points, and plot points. Believe it or not, these are actually three different terms for the same thing. Yup. Three terms. One concept. And as you may have guessed, they are moments that change the direction of […]
What Happens When Characters Lose Control of Their Emotions?
When characters become volatile, it doesn’t matter if they have a good reason or not, only the mistakes and missteps that often follow.
How to Write a Novel: A 16-Step Guide
How to write a novel, from beginning to end in 16 steps. Brainstorm, develop a great character, create an antagonist, and more.
Steadfast Stories: Characters without Change Arcs
In a positive steadfast arc, the character holds true to who he was in the beginning. Often when we think of characters arcs, we think of characters changing for the better: Scrooge giving up his miserly ways to show charity toward his follow men, Luke Skywalker choosing to trust in faith (the Force) to successfully […]
Writing a Christmas Cozy Mystery
For at least five or six years, I’ve been wanting to write a Christmas cozy mystery. I thought it would be fun to explore my recurring characters’ Christmas traditions and how the town celebrated.
Heart-Centered Book Marketing
Instead of thinking I had to contact hundreds of book bloggers to see if they’d like to review my book, I started with one blogger a week. By the end of 3 months, my book had appeared on about 20 blogs and received 10 reviews.
Eliminating On The Nose Dialoge
Crafting Authentic Dialogue: A Guide to Eliminating On-The-Nose Conversations Today’s writing tip comes from Alex Bloom, the founder of Script Reader Pro, a screenplay consultancy and blog based in Los Angeles dedicated to helping aspiring and working screenwriters. Whether or not you are a screenwriter, Alex’s writing tip applies to narrative writing too. Eliminating On-The-Nose Dialogue Have […]
How Burnout Made me a Better Author
Burnout. Few words spark such dread among writers. Avoiding it, surviving it, and recovering from it are each the focus of many articles, blogs, podcasts, books, and conference classes. Still, most of us have or will find ourselves grappling with it. This struggle resembles a hiker who has fallen off an unforeseen cliff and now clings to the sheer rockface with desperate, failing fingers, unable to pull themselves up.
How To Fix Flat, Two-Dimensional Characters
When people say that a character is “flat” or “two-dimensional,” they’re typically just saying that the character isn’t interesting. And uninteresting characters are a plague on a story. Let’s look at a few techniques to make characters interesting, round, and three-dimensional.