What do you need to take your writing to the next level? Do you wish you were stronger in some aspect of your writing skills? Or maybe the business side of your writing career could use some bolstering. Perhaps it’s your workspace or your writing schedule (or lack of) that’s impeding your progress. If it’s…
Your characters have attitudes before your story starts. Before page one and sentence one, they already have a strong point of view about the world. More specifically, they are evaluating how the world (the life all around them) is treating them. Good or bad. It’s critical that you know what makes them tick before whatever…
This last month of writing has been about stepping back and taking a look at what I have written from a different point of view. I have been reading over what I have written, a practice I try not to do until five or six chapters in, that way I am too invested to throw…
Resilience may be one of the most underrated of characteristics; as human beings it seems that the world is increasingly asking us to up our resilience game. As human beings who also happen to be writers, resilience isn’t simply a nicety, it’s obligatory. Being a writer who lacks resilience is like being a car that…
Every work of fiction is fueled by some grand conflict or tension, but on the paragraph-to-paragraph level, the story gains momentum through micro-tension. Author Donald Maass states: “Micro-tension is the moment-by-moment tension that keeps the reader in a constant state of suspense over what will happen, not in the story but in the next few…