Have you ever sat in a craft talk and felt it lacked something? The content was good, but fifteen minutes into the presentation, you find yourself scrolling through email on your phone. You’re bored, but you don’t know why. Perhaps you’re having trouble focusing, or maybe it’s as simple as the speaker failed to connect…
This is the week where Americans sit down around the dining room table, look at the people around them, and think “who are these guys?” Seriously, in two more days, we’ll all take a breather from everyday life and stop our incessant worrying about our next novel, our faltering ad campaign, the agent who hasn’t…
According to recent reports, the English language contains over 470,000 words. Compared to other languages, that’s a whole lot of words (many of which we borrowed from other languages, that’s true). According to my limited research, the average 10-year-old has a vocabulary of about 10,000 words. And as reported by The Economist magazine, their online…
Your main character—let’s call him Archie—has a problem. He’s trying to find something lost in the woods (a criminal’s hideout, perhaps, or a missing child, or a jungle-covered Mayan ruin). Suddenly, Archie knows what he needs: a drone! Now you, the author, have a problem. You’ve never flown a drone. What does it feel like…
I have recently been smacked across the head by writer’s block and have struggled getting my way through it. As a writer, I think that writer’s block is possibly the most crippling thing I could go through. It makes my love for writing seem like a chore when most days it is an escape. Writing,…