How to Level Up Our Storytelling with Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is a good trait for writers to have. What 5 habits can help us become more self-aware, and how can they strengthen our storytelling skills?
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Romance Beats vs. 12 Stages of Intimacy
A reader asked how we’d place the 12 Stages on Intimacy on a beat sheet for the best pacing. Can we mesh the 12 Stages with romance beats in a story?
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How Is Our Protagonist Challenged to Improve? (& a Worksheet!)
In our story, something makes our protagonist change and progress in their internal journey. But what’s that something? What triggers them to grow?
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Write Romance? Announcing a New Workshop!
Downloaded over 60,000 times, my Romance Beat sheet helps writers of all levels build romance stories. But how do we use this extremely popular tool?
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3 Ways to Define the Essence of Our Character
A character’s essence is about more than just unique characters, but what is their essence? These 3 perspectives on character essence teach us about our characters.
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How to Develop and Show a Healthy Romance — Guest: Bran L. Ayres
Whether we want to know for real-life purposes or for our writing, Bran’s post today helps us identify elements of healthy romances. Authors need to be careful of sending readers the wrong message. Everyone deserves to be in a healthy, loving relationship—including our characters.
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Romance Writers: New Scrivener Template!
One of my most popular posts is for my Romance Beat Sheet, but one of my readers asked if I could create a Scrivener template to go along with the Romance Beat Sheet. Yes! If you’re a romance author and use Scrivener for drafting your stories, today’s post is for you.
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What’s the Biggest Lie You Tell Yourself?
One way we develop our characters is by figuring out their false belief: What lie do they tell themselves? Now the fun thing is to think about how that idea applies in the real world. Just like our characters, we tend to hold false beliefs and lie to ourselves as well.
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Balancing Conflict in Romance Stories
One of my commenters asked a great question last week that gets to the heart of the balancing game we have to play when writing romance. The characters have to be perfect enough for each other to make a believable couple, but there also has to be enough conflict between them to sustain a story.
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How Can We Show a Character’s Internal Journey?
I’m a big fan of Michael Hauge’s approach to characters. His insights helped me figure out how to match a character’s internal journey to the external plot. This is often tricky, though, so let’s go deeper into how characters change.
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