What Should Our Story’s Climax Include?
It’s tricky to tie up all the threads in our story’s Climax and even harder to give guidelines for how to write it, but let’s try to identify some story aspects we might want to include.
Pin It5 Questions to Ask Before Hiring Help: Part One — Guest: Jeff Lyons
It’s hard to find an editor we can trust. To help, I’m sharing Part One of Jeff Lyons guest post with the questions we should ask before hiring story help, such as editors and consultants.
Pin ItStory Tropes: What’s the Subtext?
A story’s meaning and hidden messages often lurk in the subtext. Subtext flows throughout our plots, characters, themes, genres…and story tropes. Depending on how we use and twist story tropes, we might create very different messages for readers.
Pin ItOne Simple Trick to Avoid an Opening Page Infodump
It’s hard to get our opening pages just right because we have to grab readers’ attention, introduce our characters and the story world, hint at a problem, etc. With everything we want to get across to the reader, we might dump too much information. How can we avoid info dumping or confusing readers at the beginning of our story?
Pin ItHow to Strengthen Our Characters with Strong Writing
Readers can interpret our characters as weak for many reasons, such as being passive, foolish, or lacking an arc. Another way a character might seem weak is using weak sentences in our writing, making them seem more wishy-washy than we intend.
Pin ItHow Should We Deal with Character Stereotypes?
Clichés, tropes, and stereotypes all seem like signs of lazy writing. And they are—or at least, they can be. But it can be impossible to avoid all instances of stereotypical elements. So what should we do instead?
Pin ItDiversity Issues: The Importance of “Own Voices”
While all diverse stories are important, the stories that should be most encouraged are those from authors who can provide an authentic perspective. Today, Wendy Sparrow shares her insights on what “own voices” means and how others can improve their non-own-voices stories.
Pin ItWhen Readers Don’t Believe Our Writing
One of the many reasons we need feedback is to help us fill in the blanks for things we can’t see or for understanding how others might interpret our words. But what happens when readers see our words and understand our intention, but they don’t believe what we’re telling them?
Pin ItWhat Advice Do You Ignore?
There’s no shortage of writing advice out there for us to learn. Some of that advice is questionable, a few tidbits are outright harmful, but most of it is decent-to-good. Yet even if advice is good, we still might want to ignore it. Yes, really.
Pin It4 Common Copy Editing Issues to Watch For — Guest: Julie Glover
I’ve mentioned before that I write very “clean,” which saves me money on editing. If we learn what we tend to get wrong and then watch out for those issues when writing, we can strengthen the skills that can help us write cleaner.
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