Beyond a “Refresh”: Changing Our Brand
Sometimes a “refresh” of our brand isn’t enough to match the changes we want to make to our online life. Let’s explore what we might want to watch out for when we’re considering a major change.
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Are Unintended Themes Undermining Your Story?
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 the mixed messages undermining our story’s themes.
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Writing Craft Master Lists: Filling in the Blanks—Theme Development
We’ve been working to ensure my mega-lists of writing craft skills for story development, line editing, and copy editing are as complete as possible. Today, we’re diving into a deeper explanation of theme development.
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Writing Craft: Master List of Story Development Skills
With a “master list of craft skills,” we know what skills to study. Here’s my master list of Story Development skills. What craft skills do we need to understand and be able to apply to develop a story and characters?
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Romance and the Language of Consent
I’m proud to write romance, so it’s no surprise that the #MeToo movement has prompted a lot of thoughts in me about the role of the romance genre in women’s lives.
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Writing Your Worldview: Biases and Beyond
Science can be influenced by societal assumptions, so we certainly can’t keep “social ideas” out of our fiction. Our preferences, biases, beliefs, assumptions, etc. affect everything—whether we recognize them or not.
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What to Write Next: Playing Favorites
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?
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Storytelling: It’s about Going Primal — Guest: Elizabeth Randolph
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?
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Story Immersion: How Can We Improve Our Readers’ Experience? — Guest: Jefferson Smith
Beyond the vague instruction to “write well,” what can we do to increase the connection readers feel with our story? Jefferson Smith shares specific things we can do that will make our stories more immersive.
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Genre -Is- Worldbuilding
An article comparing the Arrival movie to its short story inspiration triggered me to see Genre differently. In short, our story’s genre is simply the worldbuilding “lens” we use to explore our story’s meaning.
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