How Much of Yourself Is in Your Writing?
How much of yourself is in your writing? This question can dig much deeper into who we are than just the superficial, and the more we’re aware of our influences, the more we can improve our stories.
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Are Unintended Themes Undermining Your Story?
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 the mixed messages undermining our story’s themes.
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Writing Craft Master Lists: Filling in the Blanks—Theme Development
We’ve been working to ensure my mega-lists of writing craft skills for story development, line editing, and copy editing are as complete as possible. Today, we’re diving into a deeper explanation of theme development.
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Tapping 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.
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Storytelling: 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?
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Writer Strengths: How Do You Persevere?
As writers, we push ourselves to learn new skills and strengthen our craft—despite discouragement, lack of support, and only a small chance of success. We persevere.
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Genre -Is- Worldbuilding
An article comparing the Arrival movie to its short story inspiration triggered me to see Genre differently. In short, our story’s genre is simply the worldbuilding “lens” we use to explore our story’s meaning.
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Sexy Scenes: Open Door or Closed Door?
There’s no right or wrong answer for how to depict intimacy in our writing—only what’s right for our story. The “right” amount can depend on our genre, our characters, their situation, their emotional journey, and our target audience.
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Dread Writing Sexy Scenes? 5 Tips for Success
Whatever genre we write, we often have to write scenes that make us uncomfortable. For many, sexy scenes are high on that discomfort scale.
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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.
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