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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Aspirational Stories: Do They Reflect Your Hopes and Goals?
Aspiration is “a hope or ambition of achieving something,” such as we see with the #RelationshipGoals tags on social media. Not surprisingly, our hopes and goals are sometimes reflected in the stories we write or the books we read.
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Need Help Writing Emotions? The Emotion Thesaurus Second Edition Is Here!
I’ve been helping Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi at Writers Helping Writers keep a big secret: The Emotion Thesaurus Second Edition! Angela and Becca have added new responses, new entries, and new writing tips.
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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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Make Characters Unique with Layering
Somewhere along our learning curve as writers, we’re likely to come across the skill of layering. Layering can help us create unique characters, no matter how stereotypical or tropey they might be on the surface.
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Do’s and Don’ts When Creating Villains — Guest: Kassandra Lamb
Depending on the type of villain in our story, the psychology we use to create our character changes. Kassandra Lamb shares her 8 “do’s and don’ts” to help us create our villains.
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How Do We Create Realistic Villains? — Guest: Kassandra Lamb
The antagonist in our story might be a love interest or truly evil or anything in between. When our story requires a villain, we might struggle to avoid clichés. Kassandra Lamb shares her insights into psychopaths, sociopaths, and other bad guys.
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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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What Does It Mean to Create Layered Characters?
In the writing world, we’ve probably heard the advice to create layers in our stories and characters. But the word layers can refer to many different aspects of writing, so let’s take a deeper look at one aspect of layering: character layers.
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How to Develop and Show a Healthy Romance — Guest: Bran L. Ayres
Whether we want to know for real-life purposes or for our writing, Bran’s post today helps us identify elements of healthy romances. Authors need to be careful of sending readers the wrong message. Everyone deserves to be in a healthy, loving relationship—including our characters.
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