Welcome back! In my last column I talked about the immense value of using Story Grid’s Scene Analysis Template to read with purpose, by learning how to read (and analyze a scene) like a writer. To recap: the bulk of the Scene Analysis Template focuses on how a working scene creates a Story Event—or an… Read more »
You’re an author! Congratulations! Arriving here, book in hand, you’ve joined a very exclusive club. Writing is vulnerable, sacrificial and truth be told, a bucket-list item that most will never check off. An incredible amount of work goes into writing a book: the research, the writing, the editing and various publishing tasks. These can take… Read more »
Do series characters change? A better question might be: Should series characters change? Go through some upheaval that arcs their life into uncharted waters? But, first, what is a character arc? Where does it come from? How do you create this in your fictional stories? More importantly, do you even need one? What is a… Read more »
One of the things I hear from writers again and again is how much they dislike marketing. Any time the dreaded p-word (ahem, platform) comes up in a room (in person or virtual), you can hear the collective groan ripple among the crowd. Marketing, sales, and promotion do not rank high among writers’ favorite things…. Read more »
Hey there word nerds! Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Marilyn Singer. Winner of the National Council of Teachers of English Award for Excellence in Poetry, 2015, Marilyn Singer has written more than 100 books in many genres. She created a poetry form, the “reverso,” featured in three of her award-winning collections: Mirror Mirror,… Read more »
Greetings, my lovely Speculators! I hope you’re keeping safe and well in these remarkable times. I also hope you’ve enjoyed this miniseries on the tarot for writers so far. To recap, in Part 1, I offered a brief introduction to the tarot, in Part 2, I reviewed five books on the tarot for writers, and… Read more »
So, it’s been some weird times. For those of us who are lucky, it’s been a time of constraint, worry and adjusting. For others, it’s been a time of fear, uncertainty, even mourning. I hope you are doing alright through all this, and I write this with the understanding that not all of you will… Read more »
When we’re elbows-deep in outlining, drafting, redrafting and revising our manuscripts, it can be hard to imagine that our works in progress will ever be truly finished. Yet, we will inevitably get to the end—or what feels like it could be the end—of our novel-writing process. And when that happens, the question of what to… Read more »
Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Joe Bunting. Joe is a bestselling writer, novelist, and a dad. He leads The Write Practice community, an award-winning community of creative writers. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife Talia and three kids and enjoys coffee and corpse reviver no. 2s. In this episode Joe and… Read more »
Mark your calendars for August 6th. That’s when Alison Weir’s newest historical fiction novel – Katheryn Howard: The Tainted Queen – will be available in bookshops and online. Better still, preorder it now and you’ll be among the first to have it. Though some describe Weir’s non-fiction as “popular” history (she even uses the term… Read more »
