The romance genre is often called “aspirational,” but even romances with a happy ending can fail at being uplifting. What other elements contribute to an uplifting story and what can they teach us about other genres?
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As writers, we have to make our characters seem real to readers, but it’s often not easy. So here’s two resources that can help us create characters that seem real.
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Writers need readers to grasp emotional information from non-POV characters, which can be a struggle. Becca Puglisi, co-author of the Emotion Thesaurus shares 6 techniques to avoid the problem.
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I’ve been helping Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi at Writers Helping Writers keep a big secret: The Emotion Thesaurus Second Edition! Angela and Becca have added new responses, new entries, and new writing tips.
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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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Somewhere along our learning curve as writers, we’re likely to come across the skill of layering. Layering can help us create unique characters, no matter how stereotypical or tropey they might be on the surface.
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Longer 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.
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When faced with the many decisions of writing our story, the best choice is whatever tells the story we want to tell, but what does that mean? Let’s take a look at what storytelling really is and how we can improve our skills.
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In the writing world, we’ve probably heard the advice to create layers in our stories and characters. But the word layers can refer to many different aspects of writing, so let’s take a deeper look at one aspect of layering: character layers.
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We 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?
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