Character Internalization: To Italicize or Not to Italicize?
A common question in writing forums asks when we should italicize a character’s thoughts. How should we format our characters’ internalizations?
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Punch Up Our Writing with Word Lists
At some point in our editing process, we usually have to get nitpicky about our word choices because the right words often don’t come out in the first draft. This step can be tedious but oh-so-important for strengthening our writing and improving our story’s pace.
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Showing vs. Telling: Finding the Right Balance
It’s not always easy to know how much showing or telling works best for our story, so let’s dig a little deeper into some of the problems with trying to find the right balance of showing and telling in our stories.
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Showing vs. Telling: How Do We Choose?
One of the most common pieces of writing advice is to Show, Don’t Tell. In many cases, that’s good advice, but as with most advice, that “rule” is imperfect and incomplete.
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The Most Important Question in Storytelling: “Why?”
A common problem—even in traditionally published books—is Missing Motivations. A character’s goal can feel irrelevant if readers don’t understand why they have that goal. Or a character might seem stupid or unlikable if readers don’t know why they’re acting a certain way.
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5 Tips for Empowering Description with Contrast — Guest: Marcy Kennedy
We’ve probably all heard (or thought!) that description is boring or the part readers skip. Yet our stories need description or else be confusing. Marcy Kennedy joins us today to share 5 tips to empower and add interest to our description by using contrast.
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Want to Evoke Emotions in Readers? — Guest: Marcy Kennedy
To create a great emotional story, we need to know not only the vocabulary of describing emotions, but also how we can evoke emotions in our readers. Marcy Kennedy’s here to show us how deep point of view can help us evoke those emotions we want within our readers.
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5 Tips for Finding Point-of-View Errors — Guest: Marcy Kennedy
As we learn writing craft, we often go through phases. Just when we think we know everything there is to know, we discover another area to learn. One area I struggle with, even though I know the rules, is out-of-POV phrases. Luckily, one of my editors is a genius at finding these, and she’s here to share her tips.
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Internal Dialogue: The Secret Sauce to Fixing Problems? — Guest: Marcy Kennedy
Internal dialogue is rarely discussed but can be the key to a great story. The skillful use of internal dialogue reveals a story’s emotions, characterizations, motivations, and overall arc. Internal dialogue provides context for everything our characters experience, which helps our readers know what the story means to our characters.
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Point of View: What Does Your Character Know?
When it comes to learning about point of view and how to avoid issues like head-hopping, it doesn’t help that half the information out there is confusing and contradictory. Let’s take a closer look at how we can find and fix these issues.
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