Where Normal Need Not Apply
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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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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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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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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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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It’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 stories that successfully break writing “rules.”
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A recent Twitter thread brought up problematic reader expectations with story endings. Can we find a balance between “fulfilling our story’s promise and our genre’s expectations” and avoiding a cliché ending?
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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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Given reviews about too-abrupt endings, readers might want a sense of closure beyond what authors deliver. Should we use epilogues—or epilogue-like endings—to breach the gap?
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Just as we have go-to favorite authors that we know we can depend on for delivering a certain type of story, readers are evaluating us for what we can deliver: What’s our promise to readers when they pick up one of our stories?
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