Nonfiction

Reading Time: 5 minutesWorried about lackluster scenes? Something feeling broken in your story? Return to basics and think through what a scene is and what it can and should do for your story.

Reading Time: 6 minutesInclude these four elements in your story to fit it within the fantasy genre and reach your intended fantasy readers.

Reading Time: 6 minutesYour character has done or revealed the unexpected. Now, you must figure out how to navigate your story when the path no longer adheres to your writing plan.

Reading Time: 5 minutesYour story’s plot must include key turning points, which move your characters through the story milestone by milestone.

Reading Time: 6 minutesHow can we show our readers aspects of our truest selves while giving ourselves enough narrative distance and processing space to write ourselves well?

Reading Time: 4 minutesAmbiguous pronoun-antecedent pairs hiding in your story may make the difference between reader immersion and reader confusion.

Reading Time: 5 minutesOnce you understand what story you want to tell and what you want to say about it, your task is to get the story on paper. Here are three items to jumpstart your story.

Reading Time: 6 minutesIf you wanted to write a story to submit but didn’t, what held you back from becoming the writerly unicorn you know you can be?

Reading Time: 6 minutesThrough showing, not telling, you provide a more immersive experience for your readers. Here’s how.

Reading Time: 8 minutesLimited word counts in flash stories require you to make careful and judicious choices of what to keep and what to revise away because in flash fiction, there’s little room for coyness or ambiguity.

Reading Time: 6 minutesFiction is unique to human communication, which is fascinating on its own. But why do we still look to fictions? What do they do for us in the modern age? Why does fiction matter? And what considerations must go into crafting culturally honest fictions?

Reading Time: 5 minutesStory structure is the framework around your literary jigsaw puzzle, the order into which you organize the events in your story to create a beginning, a middle, and an end. So let’s talk about some common story structures you may encounter while researching storytelling techniques.

Reading Time: 4 minutesMastering story edits isn’t easy, but there are a few books I’ve recommended to my clients repeatedly to assist them during edits, and these are also books I use myself when editing my work. The good news: Once you’ve absorbed the material covered in these books, you’ll be able to apply the lessons over and over without really thinking about them. They’ll become second-nature to your writerly process.

Reading Time: 6 minutesWhether you are looking for a new story idea, developing an existing story, or beta reading a story for another author, identifying the protagonist’s goal, motivations, and conflicts is important to understand the story’s message to readers.

Reading Time: 6 minutesMost of you will have heard the phrase: When one door closes, another one opens. But that doesn’t mean closing the one door is easy or without its challenges, and it doesn’t mean the door that opens will open up to sunshine and rainbows. In fact, many of the most rewarding learning experiences are borne of loss, grief, even tragedy.

Reading Time: 8 minutesAs fun as it is to conceptualize, philosophize, and ‘what if’ oneself through astrophysics, it’s important to know what the scientific and literary rules are for space travel so you can either use them to your story’s advantage (and please your readers with your knowledge) or disregard them intentionally in pursuit of imaginative creative expression.

Reading Time: 7 minutesRegardless of genre, tropes, and intended audiences, every novel you pick up has three things in common: structure, character, and plot.

Reading Time: 5 minutesWhen you know the purpose of your opening line, crafting the opener and tinkering with it until it hums can even be fun.