Romance and the Language of Consent
I’m proud to write romance, so it’s no surprise that the #MeToo movement has prompted a lot of thoughts in me about the role of the romance genre in women’s lives.
Pin ItWriting Styles: Transitioning from Nonfiction to Fiction — Guest: Elizabeth Randolph
Just because we’re skilled at nonfiction writing doesn’t mean we’re skilled at storytelling (or vice versa). To do both, we might have to unlearn a lot of what we’ve learned about writing. Today, Elizabeth Randolph shares her insights on changing writing styles.
Pin ItTapping into Strong Emotions with Memories
Our readers often want an emotional connection to our story and characters, but sometimes we struggle to explore deep emotions in our stories. Luckily, our lifetime of memories is the perfect repository of emotions for us to mine.
Pin ItHow to Create Scene Endings that Hook Readers
We’ve been talking about the difference types of transitions we might create between scenes and plot events. Today, we’re focusing on the types of sentences that will strengthen our scene endings (and thus our scenes).
Pin ItTransition Techniques: Meanwhile, in Our Subplot…
Last time, we discussed how to identify and fix episodic writing to make our stories stronger with the “But” and “Therefore” rule. However, there’s another option for transitioning from scene to scene: the “meanwhile.”
Pin ItIs Your Writing Episodic—or Epic?
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 find and fix episodic writing so we can take our story to “epic” level.
Pin ItStory Immersion: How Can We Improve Our Readers’ Experience? — Guest: Jefferson Smith
Beyond the vague instruction to “write well,” what can we do to increase the connection readers feel with our story? Jefferson Smith shares specific things we can do that will make our stories more immersive.
Pin ItShowing vs. Telling: How Do We Choose?
One of the most common pieces of writing advice is to Show, Don’t Tell. In many cases, that’s good advice, but as with most advice, that “rule” is imperfect and incomplete.
Pin ItAntagonists: How to Avoid Boring Villains — Guest: Kristen Lamb
In Kristen Lamb’s guest post series on antagonists, we’ve talked a lot about the non-evil, non-villain style of antagonists. Today we’re finally(!) focusing on the villain and how we can avoid mustache-twirling by giving them depth.
Pin ItAntagonists: What’s Driving Our Story? — Guest: Kristen Lamb
We’ve explored how antagonists act as the conflict-engine for our story, but our Big Boss Troublemaker isn’t in every scene. What keeps the rest of our story going? Kristen’s going to teach us today about scene antagonists.
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