Pitching Our Story: Insights from Movie Trailers
When pitching our story, we might struggle with figuring out which elements to focus on. How do we decide what to emphasize in our pitch?
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Worldbuilding Is for Every Story
Everyone understands what worldbuilding is for fantasy, science fiction, historical, etc., but what does worldbuilding mean for contemporary stories?
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Writing Prompts: Helpful? Or a Waste of Time? — Guest: Savannah Cordova
Writing prompts can help with inspiration or creativity, or distract us from the writing we’re “supposed to” do. How can we make them more helpful to us?
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Worldbuilding a Series: Writing without a Plan
Some writers plan their worldbuilding details in advance. Others…not so much. How can we worldbuild when we write a series by the seat of our pants?
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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.
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More Than a Happy Ending: What Makes a Story Uplifting?
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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Story Tropes: How Do We Twist a Cliché?
Sometimes we’ll hear writing advice like “avoid clichés,” but what does that mean when it comes to story tropes? After all, can’t tropes be helpful? And if so, how do we make them less cliché?
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Aspirational Stories: Do They Reflect Your Hopes and Goals?
Aspiration is “a hope or ambition of achieving something,” such as we see with the #RelationshipGoals tags on social media. Not surprisingly, our hopes and goals are sometimes reflected in the stories we write or the books we read.
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Our Story’s Essence: What’s the Story We Want to Tell?
Last week, we talked about discovering the essence of our character, but what about the essence of our story. What makes a story idea the one we want to tell? And why does understanding our story’s essence matter?
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3 Ways to Define the Essence of Our Character
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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