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 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 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 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.
Pin ItStorytelling: It’s about Going Primal — Guest: Elizabeth Randolph
When we first start writing, we often learn lots of new “rules,” which can narrow our focus onto writing craft so much that we lose sight of storytelling. How can we regain that storytelling mindset?
Pin ItHow to Create Scene Endings that Hook Readers
We’ve been talking about the difference types of transitions we might create between scenes and plot events. Today, we’re focusing on the types of sentences that will strengthen our scene endings (and thus our scenes).
Pin ItTransition Techniques: Meanwhile, in Our Subplot…
Last time, we discussed how to identify and fix episodic writing to make our stories stronger with the “But” and “Therefore” rule. However, there’s another option for transitioning from scene to scene: the “meanwhile.”
Pin ItIs Your Writing Episodic—or Epic?
It’s time for another post as a Resident Writing Coach over at Writers Helping Writers, and this time we’re talking about how to find and fix episodic writing so we can take our story to “epic” level.
Pin ItStory Immersion: How Can We Improve Our Readers’ Experience? — Guest: Jefferson Smith
Beyond the vague instruction to “write well,” what can we do to increase the connection readers feel with our story? Jefferson Smith shares specific things we can do that will make our stories more immersive.
Pin ItThe Ultimate Gift Guide for Writers — 2017 Edition
If you’re a writer, this list might help you give suggestions to family or friends. Or you can direct your family to this post for ideas. Something on this list is bound to please every writer out there.
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