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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What Can Authors and Readers Learn from #CopyPasteCris?
In the recent scandal known as #CopyPasteCris, Cristiane Serruya plagiarized a lot of books. We’re looking at how it happened and what (if anything) can be done to prevent it from happening again.
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Romance Love: Happy Valentine’s Day!
It’s often not easy to be a romance author, and the time around Valentine’s Day can be especially trying. A whole day (or week) focused on love and romance brings out all types of naysayers for the romance genre.
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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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Is There an Easier Way to Write a Synopsis? — Guest: Romy Sommer
Have you struggled with writing a synopsis, query, or Amazon book description? Romy Sommer shares her 10 step process for finding the core of our story and writing synopses.
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Creating Satisfying Endings without Clichés
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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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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