Helping Writers Become Authors

When we place the emphasis on non-actions, we're failing to tell readers what they should be visualizing.

Always be aware of what you're promising readers.

Readers feel condescended to when you let your characters ramble on in enigmatic sentences that hint at something juicy and interesting without including readers.

We can start getting all obsessive-compulsive about creating a perfect first draft - and we end by totally psyching ourselves out.

To create the best story possible, we have to not just spend the time to prep and write a book, but also the months and even years necessary to smooth out all its rough spots.

Over-explaining can manifest in several ways, but the core of the problem is always repetition - and it's usually symptomatic of authorial insecurity.

The obstacle that stands between your character and his overall story goal could be any number of non-human manifestations.

Writers write. But sometimes, when they have good reasons for doing so, writers don't write.

What steps can you take to come up with your own perfect title?

Trust your characters to be lovable without affectations, and trust your readers to be smart enough to hear the accents with only a few prompts.

Readers don't like to be cheated, lied to, or tricked. And that's where foreshadowing comes into play.

If we can spend less time trying to find our favorite pen or our notes on one of our minor characters, we'll be able to spend more time actually writing.

"Suddenly" has this ironic tendency to mitigate the very effect it's trying to create.

Sitting down to write, in itself, isn't enough. We also have to be excited about every single thing we write.

When readers decide to join hands with us, they are, in essence, becoming our co-writers.

Authors should learn to spot the most prevalent sentence slips-ups and know when to eliminate them from their stories.

If the structure that underlies our sentences and paragraphs is going to effectively convey our thoughts to our readers it will always adhere to the logical pattern of cause and effect.

What if something that happens in your story doesn't seem to fit into the goal/conflict/disaster paradigm of the scene?

At first blush, scene structure can be a subject that takes a while to fully grasp and, as a result, can spawn all kinds of questions.

To help you realize the possibilities of the sequel, let's take a look at some of the common variations we find.