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.
Pin ItWhere Normal Need Not Apply
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.
Pin ItAnytime we make a lot of changes to our story, we risk problems, but it helps to track the edits we need to make. How can we organize our revision?
Pin ItLonger writing—such as stories—can often be easier to write than something shorter, like a synopsis, query, Twitter pitch, or log line. That’s why the skills important in poetry can strengthen our prose writing.
Pin ItIt’s time for another post as a Resident Writing Coach over at Writers Helping Writers, and this time we’re talking about the lessons we can learn from TV writing that might help us with scene and chapter hooks.
Pin ItWe reveal our story through countless decisions in every scene, and we sometimes know which options seem right for our story. But other times, we might not be sure. In those cases, how do we decide which way to play out a scene?
Pin ItThe implication of the advice to “show, don’t tell” is that showing is “better” than telling when our story actually needs both. Let’s explore what “show, don’t tell” really means when it comes to storytelling.
Pin ItThe word showing obviously makes us think visually, but same as us, our characters experience the world through more than just their visual sense. What are our options for showing beyond visual descriptions? Can we create a deeper world by engaging other senses?
Pin ItNeed a beat sheet for a short story? Technically, my beat sheets can be customized for any length story, but let’s take a look at how story structure changes with our story’s length and how beat sheets might need to adjust for short stories.
Pin ItRecently, a blog reader asked me whether she should worry about her word count while she revised. Her question highlights how a better understanding of the revision process can help our storytelling.
Pin ItA Black Moment is an event in our story that steals the protagonist’s hope for a solution. However, some stories don’t make sense with a typical catastrophe for a Black Moment. How can we give them a Black Moment that will work?
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