Helping Writers Become Authors

Here is a first chapter checklist to help you provide the setup for a solid story and pique the curiosity of your readers with amazing hooks.

Writers must know how to craft words that are beautiful because they are true and words that true because they are beautiful. Consider eight principles of writing both plain prose and beautiful prose.

Here's how to take risks with your writing that will spur you to greater growth as an individuals--and, by extension, give you the opportunity to share that growth with the world.

If you can spot, objectively analyze, and eliminate these seven kinds of self-indulgent writing from your story, you will have taken a huge step toward streamlining your book into powerfully-focused art.

Here are six ways you can learn to pay attention to your visual imagination, mine it for its full wealth, and then craft a story that unforgettably shares the riches with your readers.

If you can create a story with cohesion and resonance, you will have written something truly magical. Let's examine what each is, why they matter individually, and how they work together.

Writing to the right audience may not mean what you think it does. You don't have to know who you readers will be in order to write a book optimized for them.

Here are four reading resolutions you can make this year that will help you become better readers--and improve your writing skills along the way.

Exploring the formative influences that made you a writer is a vastly worthwhile venture. Here's how to move forward into a better understanding of why you're drawn to the kind of stories you write.

Today, let's tell ourselves the story of why we write. Realizing the answers can help open up a new understanding of how to write bigger, better, clearer, and keener.

Discover the five most important secrets of good storytelling--which also happen to be the five most common problems in modern books and movies.

Instead of goals, this year try focusing on New Year's lessons and how you can move forward in building upon their foundation.

Check out my list of the top books of 2017--both Fiction and Non-Fiction, with a few bonus writing-craft titles thrown in.

Don't be afraid of learning how to write funny. It is a teachable technique arising from the strong foundation of well-realized characters and story beats.

Learn from these real-time examples how to choose the right sentences for your story, in a way that will make you a better writer with every book you write.

There are 5 categories for the "little" things that need to be on your novel-writing checklist. Although primarily cosmetic, they are still crucial.

Learn what purple prose is, how to recognize when you're creating it, and how to write genuinely excellent prose in its place.

The 5 items on this novel-writing checklist will impact every page. Whether you're writing or revising, make sure all your story's pieces are in place.

Worried about formulaic story structure? Learn four ways to find the perfect balance between utilizing structure and unleashing your originality.

Learn to recognize 5 negative reasons to write and use them as launch pads to greater growth in uncovering the only true reason to write.