What’s Your Personal Story?
Many are struggling with anxiety, but stories have power in a crisis. Beyond the stories we write, there’s also the story we tell ourselves about our life.
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Boring Love Scene? 3 Pitfalls to Avoid — Guest: Roni Loren
Love scenes are often difficult to write, especially if we don’t know how to write them well. Roni Loren’s sharing 3 pitfalls to avoid.
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Worldbuilding Is for Every Story
Everyone understands what worldbuilding is for fantasy, science fiction, historical, etc., but what does worldbuilding mean for contemporary stories?
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Story Tropes: How Do We Twist a Cliché?
Sometimes we’ll hear writing advice like “avoid clichés,” but what does that mean when it comes to story tropes? After all, can’t tropes be helpful? And if so, how do we make them less cliché?
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One Step to Better Writing and More Diversity
The push for diversity isn’t about valuing diversity over storytelling. Or about meeting a quota. Or making a statement. This is about being a better writer.
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The Danger of Political Correctness for Diverse Books
Diverse books are important—not simply for the sake of diversity—but so that by sheer number of representations, any one type of character isn’t limited to a stereotype. The truth is that we are all diverse. No one stereotypical character will ever represent us, no matter our color, nationality, or background.
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Blogging Tip: Increase Shares with Images that Pop
Images help our blog post be noticed, and many social media sites (where our post might be shared) focus on images as well. So including an image with our post means that we’re not only capturing readers’ attention, but we’re also increasing the odds that our post will be shared. Great! But not all images are appropriate for our blog.
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Should We Learn to Write Series?
Many books recently on the bestseller lists have been part of series. From the Divergent series to the new cliffhanger and serial books, series are a popular trend. But what if we don’t naturally write series? Will we be left behind? The “lessons learned” section in my post about Beverly […]
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In Defense of Pantsing
Too much writing advice assumes that pantsers can’t succeed. But trust me, we can, and the pantsing method is not the cause of any problems.
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What Should an Author Website Include?
Some writers—understandably—don’t want to blog. Blogging can take away from our writing time. Thinking of post topics can be difficult. And if we don’t gain a readership (or our blog readership doesn’t cross over into the target audience for our books), it can feel like a waste of time and […]
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