Branding 101: Defining Our Brand
In our writing career, tangible lessons are often easier to learn, but branding can be intangible. How can we use tangible ideas to define our brand?
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Pitching Our Story: Insights from Movie Trailers
When pitching our story, we might struggle with figuring out which elements to focus on. How do we decide what to emphasize in our pitch?
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Worldbuilding Is for Every Story
Everyone understands what worldbuilding is for fantasy, science fiction, historical, etc., but what does worldbuilding mean for contemporary stories?
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The Power of Character Arcs
Without spoilers for Avengers: Endgame, let’s explore how the power of the Marvel movies isn’t about the plot or spectacle—but with the characters.
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Worldbuilding: Your Story World’s History 101
Worldbuilding means we have to create the “rules” for our characters and their story world. How can we can develop our story’s world to make it feel real?
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What Defines Our Story? Drive vs. Focus
Ever feel like popular writing advice doesn’t apply to your story? Defining our story’s mix of drive vs. focus might help us know when advice is a bad fit.
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More Than a Happy Ending: What Makes a Story Uplifting?
The romance genre is often called “aspirational,” but even romances with a happy ending can fail at being uplifting. What other elements contribute to an uplifting story and what can they teach us about other genres?
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Romance Love: Happy Valentine’s Day!
It’s often not easy to be a romance author, and the time around Valentine’s Day can be especially trying. A whole day (or week) focused on love and romance brings out all types of naysayers for the romance genre.
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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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