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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Story Revisions: Keeping Track of Changes
Anytime we make a lot of changes to our story, we risk problems, but it helps to track the edits we need to make. How can we organize our revision?
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Making a Big Revision? Stitching Our Story’s Rips Together
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 stitch together the pieces of our story after a big revision.
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How Do Pantsers Develop Characters?
Plotters might find any kind of pantsing hard to understand, but even pantsers can struggle with pantsing our characters’ development, as that process comes with a different set of problems from developing our plots.
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Writer Flexibility: Trying New Things
The processes and techniques that worked on our last story might not work on our next one. So the more tools at our fingertips, the better our chances of finding something that will work.
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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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Storytelling: Taking Readers on a Journey
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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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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How to Use Focused Brainstorming to Develop Our Plot — Guest: Janice Hardy
Unless we’re only ever going to write just one book, we need to improve our ability to develop an idea into a story. That means we need to learn how to brainstorm in a productive way.
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