Can Passive Goals Ever Be Good for Our Story?
Our characters don’t want to change, so they often start with passive internal goals. How we can make those passive goals work for us and our story?
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What’s Your Non-Fiction Voice?
Even if we usually write fiction, we’ll likely write non-fiction sometimes. And when our fiction voice isn’t appropriate, we’ll need to develop a different style for non-fiction.
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Story Revisions: Keeping Track of Changes
Anytime we make a lot of changes to our story, we risk problems, but it helps to track the edits we need to make. How can we organize our revision?
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How Do Pantsers Develop Characters?
Plotters might find any kind of pantsing hard to understand, but even pantsers can struggle with pantsing our characters’ development, as that process comes with a different set of problems from developing our plots.
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3 Ways to Define the Essence of Our Character
A character’s essence is about more than just unique characters, but what is their essence? These 3 perspectives on character essence teach us about our characters.
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Character Conflict: Goals, Needs, and False Beliefs
Just as our characters can have inner and outer layers, the same applies to their goals. Those two types of goals can give them internal and external arcs. But what do we mean by conflicting goals—and how do false beliefs play a role?
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Choices, Choices: Debating How a Scene Should Play Out
We reveal our story through countless decisions in every scene, and we sometimes know which options seem right for our story. But other times, we might not be sure. In those cases, how do we decide which way to play out a scene?
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Ask Jami: How Can We Use Beat Sheets with Short Stories?
Need a beat sheet for a short story? Technically, my beat sheets can be customized for any length story, but let’s take a look at how story structure changes with our story’s length and how beat sheets might need to adjust for short stories.
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Breaking Down the Steps of Revision to Improve Our Storytelling
Recently, a blog reader asked me whether she should worry about her word count while she revised. Her question highlights how a better understanding of the revision process can help our storytelling.
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How to Create Positive Themes Despite Bittersweet Endings
Because our themes live in the subtext, it’s easy to create unintended themes that undermine our intended theme. That risk increases if we’re trying to create success themes but our story has a bittersweet ending.
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