Where Normal Need Not Apply
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.
Pin It
The vast majority of us will write more than one story during our life, so at some point in our career, we’ll have to decide what we’re going to write next. The question then becomes, how do we decide?
Pin It
Many of my most popular posts share tools I’ve developed to help writers. By request, here’s a Scrivener template for my Master Beat Sheet, which combines the Save the Cat Beat Sheet and my Story Engineering Beat Sheet.
Pin It
This time of year is ripe for wrap-ups of what we accomplished over the previous year. However, it’s easy to reach the end of 2017 and feel like a failure for not accomplishing enough or not reaching a certain goal or milestone.
Pin It
We often hear advice about online marketing, but we shouldn’t forget local opportunities. Elizabeth Randolph is here to give her unvarnished look at a few local promotion options—what worked, what didn’t, and what she wants to try in the future.
Pin It
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?
Pin It
Like many, this time of year, I’m often in the mood for Christmas-themed stories. So that’s a reminder that while holidays are chaotic, we might use them for writing inspiration.
Pin It
We’ve been talking about the difference types of transitions we might create between scenes and plot events. Today, we’re focusing on the types of sentences that will strengthen our scene endings (and thus our scenes).
Pin It
Last time, we discussed how to identify and fix episodic writing to make our stories stronger with the “But” and “Therefore” rule. However, there’s another option for transitioning from scene to scene: the “meanwhile.”
Pin It
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 episodic writing so we can take our story to “epic” level.
Pin It
