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 a Series: Writing without a Plan
Some writers plan their worldbuilding details in advance. Others…not so much. How can we worldbuild when we write a series by the seat of our pants?
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Worldbuilding: Your Story World’s History 101
Worldbuilding means we have to create the “rules” for our characters and their story world. How can we can develop our story’s world to make it feel real?
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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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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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Need Help Writing Emotions? The Emotion Thesaurus Second Edition Is Here!
I’ve been helping Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi at Writers Helping Writers keep a big secret: The Emotion Thesaurus Second Edition! Angela and Becca have added new responses, new entries, and new writing tips.
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3 Ways to Define the Essence of Our Character
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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Make Characters Unique with Layering
Somewhere along our learning curve as writers, we’re likely to come across the skill of layering. Layering can help us create unique characters, no matter how stereotypical or tropey they might be on the surface.
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