Blog
5 Opening Lines that Grab an Audience
Every writer wants their “Marley was dead to begin with” moment. That one sentence sets the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol off on the perfect footing. These five techniques are great for grabbing a reader and charging the writer’s battery as they work. After all, when the writer is having fun, the audience can feel it too.
Five Tips for Writing Queer Characters
Writing queer characters in your stories can be tricky if you’ve never written them before. However, there are some simple tips to properly represent queer characters in your stories.
Time Is A Character: Using Chronology Creatively In Your Writing
Using time in your writing doesn't just mean time travel. Time loops, flash backs, nonlinear storytelling, and more. It's all about time.
How To Use Humor as a Literary Device Effectively in Your Writing
There’s always a time and place for humor it isn’t for everyone so how do you use humor efficiently so it works for you in your writing?
3 Common Tropes in Fiction and How to Give Them a Fresh Twist
If you’ve ever taken a look at your book shelf and recognized a lot of common character arcs, plot devices, and recurring themes, congrats you have a type. Or rather, you have a favorite trope. Maybe several.
Writing Compelling Villains Your Readers Will Love To Hate
Anyone can be a villain. It takes someone truly special to be a compelling villain. How do you bridge that gap from general flunky to evil mastermind?
Tips For Writing Dynamic Dialogue
If you want to write authentic and captivating dialogue that doesn't sound like actors in an employee safety video, consider these tips as you write.
Symbolism in Writing: Planned or Subconscious?
There have always been those who write by planning and those that write on a whim, when it comes to symbolism, it’s much the same. However, what’s interesting is the deeper symbolic elements that come up unplanned in a story. Many authors are surprised to find the connections and deeper meaning their readers pull out of a story.
Creating a Red Herring
Red Herrings are a great way to keep readers guessing. A type of foreshadowing, they're pieces that are meant to mislead your reader into expecting a different outcome.
Improve your Writing: Double Word Woes
Sometimes there's only so many ways to express the same idea, item, or action, but with too much unnecessary repetition, your story really suffers. A small oversight may wrongly give the impression of a limited vocabulary or overly simplistic story.
Addressing New Writer Insecurities
So, you want to write a book. But you have some insecurities about it. This is the post for you!
First thing’s first. There is no “right answer” when it comes to writing. Writing is an art form; an expression of creativity.
Should We Free Ourselves from Writing Codes?
Stephen King with The Shining, Madame de Bovary by Flaubert or even Baudelaire, these renowned authors have one thing in common: they broke the codes of their respective literary genres. But first, what exactly are these codes?