Writing Craft: Master List of Story Development Skills
Learn what skills to study with my master list of Story Development skills. What craft skills do we need to understand and be able to apply to develop a story and characters?
Pin ItEditing Processes: How Do We Improve?
No matter our publishing path, our work always needs to go through an editing process, but when are we ready for editing? How will we know? If we start too soon, we’re likely to struggle and waste time and/or money.
Pin ItStory Development through Travel and Inspiration — Guest: Kelly Maher
Writers find inspiration everywhere. That’s one reason why travel can be very inspiring to us. Yet inspiration doesn’t always work out like we planned, and we might need to watch out for inspiration leading us astray.
Pin ItUsing Facebook to Reach Readers and Sell Books — Guest: Christina Delay
For every author who’s been successful with Facebook Ads, dozens more have seen their investment disappear. Christina Delay’s sharing her advice on learning about our readers and reaching out to them with Facebook.
Pin ItWriting Your Worldview: Biases and Beyond
Science can be influenced by societal assumptions, so we certainly can’t keep “social ideas” out of our fiction. Our preferences, biases, beliefs, assumptions, etc. affect everything—whether we recognize them or not.
Pin ItBranding 101: What’s the Voice of Your Brand?
There’s no “always right” approach to our brand’s voice. The traditional advice is to avoid talking about religion or politics, but in a politicized world, should our personal beliefs play a role in our brand or not?
Pin ItWriting Styles: Transitioning from Nonfiction to Fiction — Guest: Elizabeth Randolph
Just because we’re skilled at nonfiction writing doesn’t mean we’re skilled at storytelling (or vice versa). To do both, we might have to unlearn a lot of what we’ve learned about writing. Today, Elizabeth Randolph shares her insights on changing writing styles.
Pin ItTapping into Strong Emotions with Memories
Our readers often want an emotional connection to our story and characters, but sometimes we struggle to explore deep emotions in our stories. Luckily, our lifetime of memories is the perfect repository of emotions for us to mine.
Pin ItWhat to Write Next: Playing Favorites
The vast majority of us will write more than one story during our life, so at some point in our career, we’ll have to decide what we’re going to write next. The question then becomes, how do we decide?
Pin ItCalling All Scrivener-Using Over Achievers!
Many of my most popular posts share tools I’ve developed to help writers. By request, here’s a Scrivener template for my Master Beat Sheet, which combines the Save the Cat Beat Sheet and my Story Engineering Beat Sheet.
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