My kids will be officially young adults in a few weeks, when my son turns eighteen. This threshold into adulthood has stirred up memories from their early childhood. How I sang nursery rhymes to my daughter and had to change the genders of all the heroes in her bedtime stories as I read. How my… Read more »
On the back of every book you’ve bought in a bookstore, you’ll find a string of numbers, usually punctuated with dashes. It looks something like this: 978-0-9997003-0-3. This mysterious code is an International Standard Book Number, or ISBN. If you’re a self-publishing author, you should consider having them for your books. What Is An ISBN?… Read more »
Any list of tips for writing complex, flesh and blood LGBTQ+ fictional characters should mirror the list for writing complex, flesh and blood LGBTQ+ human characters. Whether you identify as a member of one of the groups represented by the capital letters+ or not, it takes passion, knowledge, empathy, imagination, skill, and love to write… Read more »
Hey there word nerds! Today, we’re doing another one of our live-from-a-conference interviews, this time from RWA annual conference, where I have the pleasure of interviewing Nisha Sharma. But first, some backstory. The RWA conference is the big event that the Romance Writers of America put on each year. I had the pleasure of speaking… Read more »
“Everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little.” –Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir I remember sitting at the desk in my hotel room in Philadelphia one Saturday afternoon a few years ago, putting some time into working on my memoir but making zero progress. I was trying to write… Read more »
The importance of readability in a novel is an exhaustive conversation, but a necessary one for writers wanting to sell books. Word processing and editing programs offer a wide variety of grade level and reading ease scales to determine who might be able to read and understand your work. Some writers analyze this closely while… Read more »
We love, hate, and cry over fictional characters. They can be our best friends, first loves, and most inspiring mentors. So how can we, as writers, make sure our stories are populated by characters readers care about? It’s not enough to have so-so characters, and we definitely don’t want them to be flat or boring…. Read more »
Hey there word nerds! Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Todd Herman, who I am honored to count as one of my mentors. I first met Todd about five years ago, when he gave a talk at an entrepreneurship event, and right away I could tell that he was speaking my language. You see,… Read more »
My next few articles will act as a deep dive into specific short form works. We’ll examine a piece from each short form and look into its inner workings to find the path to success in our own short form pieces. I confess that I don’t regularly read plays. I’m not a theater maven. And… Read more »
Hi writing warriors, and welcome back to studying and understanding James Scott Bell’s genius breakdown of a plot’s 14 signpost scenes (as discussed in his craft book Super Structure)! If you recall from my last month’s column—featuring Signpost Scene #10, Mounting Forces—we’ve forged forward into the last act of the story. In other words, it’s… Read more »
