Your Story’s Promise: Do You Need an Epilogue?
Given reviews about too-abrupt endings, readers might want a sense of closure beyond what authors deliver. Should we use epilogues—or epilogue-like endings—to breach the gap?
Pin ItEpilogue Pros and Cons: But Wait — There’s More!
We often talk about the pros and cons of prologues, but epilogues can be good or bad as well. Let’s look at how epilogues differ from normal endings, what they can do, and what they shouldn’t do.
Pin ItHow to Use Focused Brainstorming to Develop Our Plot — Guest: Janice Hardy
Unless we’re only ever going to write just one book, we need to improve our ability to develop an idea into a story. That means we need to learn how to brainstorm in a productive way.
Pin ItNaNo Prep: Is Your Story Idea Ready?
To make NaNo work for us, we need to figure out our goals for the experience—and there’s no wrong answer. However, if our goal is to create a coherent story, we should try to understand story structure.
Pin ItHow to Save a Broken Story
A truly broken story is one where the pieces of the story don’t come together in a coherent whole. But if we’re willing to put in the work, virtually any story can be saved. Then question then is: What steps should we take to fix a broken story?
Pin ItBranding 101: What Does Our Brand Promise to Readers?
Just as we have go-to favorite authors that we know we can depend on for delivering a certain type of story, readers are evaluating us for what we can deliver: What’s our promise to readers when they pick up one of our stories?
Pin ItBrainstorming Your Story? Proactively Avoid Issues
After we finish brainstorming and start trying to assemble our ideas into a story, that’s the perfect point in our writing process to avoid major problems by questioning what story issues we might run into before we write too many words.
Pin ItCan TV Shows Help Us Hook Our Readers?
It’s time for another post as a Resident Writing Coach over at Writers Helping Writers, and this time we’re talking about the lessons we can learn from TV writing that might help us with scene and chapter hooks.
Pin ItCharacter 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?
Pin ItWhat 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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