Your Story’s Promise: Do You Need an Epilogue?
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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Epilogue Pros and Cons: But Wait — There’s More!
We often talk about the pros and cons of prologues, but epilogues can be good or bad as well. Let’s look at how epilogues differ from normal endings, what they can do, and what they shouldn’t do.
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NaNo Prep: Is Your Story Idea Ready?
To make NaNo work for us, we need to figure out our goals for the experience—and there’s no wrong answer. However, if our goal is to create a coherent story, we should try to understand story structure.
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How to Save a Broken Story
A truly broken story is one where the pieces of the story don’t come together in a coherent whole. But if we’re willing to put in the work, virtually any story can be saved. Then question then is: What steps should we take to fix a broken story?
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Brainstorming Your Story? Proactively Avoid Issues
After we finish brainstorming and start trying to assemble our ideas into a story, that’s the perfect point in our writing process to avoid major problems by questioning what story issues we might run into before we write too many words.
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Setting Up a Book Launch for Success — Guest: Christina Delay
Part of being an author is finding and marketing our book to readers who will love our story. If we think like a business person, we can see how the launching of a new book has many similarities to how businesses launch a new product.
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What Do You Want to Write But Haven’t Yet?
We often have more ideas for stories than we actually write, and somehow, we choose and prioritize. Why might we not write a story idea that we’re passionate about—and is there anything we can do to overcome those reasons?
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Can TV Shows Help Us Hook Our Readers?
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 TV writing that might help us with scene and chapter hooks.
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Choices, Choices: Debating How a Scene Should Play Out
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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How Important Is Talent? — Guest: Lizzie Shane
In artistic fields such as writing, we might think success depends on talent, and any struggle can be seen as a sign of our lack of talent. Today Lizzie Shane shares her insights on the importance of talent for success.
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