Whether you’re a panster who makes things up as you write or a plotter who has a story outline before writing, your first draft will not be perfect. Overwriters will have too much fluff in their stories, and underwriters will Read more
This week I’m going to keep my post short yet hopefully powerful. I want to discuss what keeps readers interested in a story. Is it the villain? The setting? The romance? When we boil everything down to the very basics, Read more
Info dumps happen when a large amount of information is given all at once in a story. Typically, these dumps are about worldbuilding or character backstory. As the writers, we know all these fun details about our characters and setting, Read more
Every story should have some tension in each scene, though the level of tension will vary. Major turning points in the plot, like the midpoint or climax, will be higher while the connecting scenes might just have a low level Read more
I’m not going to lie to you; I’ve never launched a book…yet. I considered waiting to discuss this topic until I had, but then I realized it didn’t matter. No one strategy for launching a book will work for everyone. Read more
As writers, we hear the phrase “Show, don’t tell” quite a bit. Like most things, there is more than one layer to this advice. A while back, I gave some advice on deep point of view, and in that post Read more
Lately, I’ve been thinking about marketing and what my books have to offer the world. I wrote a post a while back on defining your audience, but today I’d like to focus on what makes people want to buy books. Read more
It’s time for another Character Under A Microscope post where I dig deep into character development. While most people pick up a story for the plot, they stay for the characters. Therefore, you want to make them as realistic and Read more
Have you ever read a story and felt cheated by the end? Perhaps there was some tense situation, but it turned out to be nothing. Or maybe the protagonist’s lover died but then in the end you’re told the two Read more
Today, I want to talk about just one part of speech: adjectives. Unlike adverbs, these descriptors are more accepted in literature. However, some adjectives are better than others. Let’s get into three types of adjectives and how they should (or Read more