How Pacing Helps Readers Care about Our Characters
I never watched Game of Thrones but this past season is an excellent example of how pacing can affect character arcs and readers’ relationships to our characters.
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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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The Power of Character Arcs
Without spoilers for Avengers: Endgame, let’s explore how the power of the Marvel movies isn’t about the plot or spectacle—but with the characters.
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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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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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Creating Characters Who Clash — Guest: Angela Ackerman
Every page of our story should include tension, such as friction between characters, but how do we create characters who clash? Let’s see how to develop characters who create tension in every interaction.
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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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Struggle to Write Characters? Here’s Help!
As writers, we have to make our characters seem real to readers, but it’s often not easy. So here’s two resources that can help us create characters that seem real.
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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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6 Ways to Show Emotions for Non-POV Characters — Guest: Becca Puglisi
Writers need readers to grasp emotional information from non-POV characters, which can be a struggle. Becca Puglisi, co-author of the Emotion Thesaurus shares 6 techniques to avoid the problem.
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