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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Probably no one can claim to be an expert at making sure the cool character in our head makes it onto the page. We can only guess at how readers will interpret what we tell them. Advice can help us share our brain with our readers as much as possible, but the process will never—ever—be completely clean.
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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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With a new year, we often want to start on the right foot. We don’t want to repeat last year’s mistakes. (Let’s make new ones instead, right? *smile*) So to get and stay organized, I’d love to find a time management approach that helped me track everything.
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Happy New Year! To concentrate on good things for the new year, let’s talk about what things worked for us and what we want to continue in the new year. We need to recognize those successes to give ourselves credit, to ensure we don’t let our good habits fade by the wayside, and so we know how to push our successes through into the new year.
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I want us all to have an even better year in 2015, so we might need to work on our weaknesses or identify what didn’t work for us this past year. What decisions, processes, or priorities held us back? The better we understand ourselves, the more likely we are to know how to succeed in the future.
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If you’re celebrating this week, I hope your plans all unfold smoothly, your travels all go safely, your family members all behave perfectly, and all your dreams for the New Year come true. Before I go offline for the holiday, I wanted to leave you with some fun (and yummy) gifts.
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Whether we won NaNoWriMo or not, we survived November, and I want to take a moment to gasp—er, breathe. After everything that went wrong with my month, winning feels like a miracle. So let’s talk about how we can move forward from any draft, NaNo or not.
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Many of us need help knowing what gifts to buy for people, so with that in mind, I’m sharing my Ultimate Gift Guide for Writers. If you’re a writer, this might help you give suggestions to family or friends. Or you can direct your family to this post for ideas. Something on this list is bound to please every writer out there.
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We often write about settings or jobs or situations we haven’t experienced, and diversity among our characters should be no different. Today’s guest post is about how we can research and learn more about experiences for which we don’t have first-hand knowledge and avoid the fear of “getting it wrong.”
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