Sacha Black

#5onFri: Five Ways to Improve Your Description

Description is one of those magical elements of prose. Whether it’s “good” or not is entirely subjective. One author’s Mozart is another’s Metallica. But, regardless of your preferences, there are some techniques and literary tools you can use to tighten your sentences and sharpen your description. Here are just five tricks you can use.  1)… Read more »

Alison Hammer

Five Tips for Writing Every Day

Unfortunately, no one has invented a way to write a novel without actually sitting down to write it. So it remains true that the only way to finish whatever project you’re working on is to keep filling that page with words. Trust me, I know it’s not as easy as it sounds. There’s nothing more… Read more »

Brenda Joyce Patterson

Writing Small in Viral Times

This is not the article I intended to write.  But I found, just as likely you, too, that I couldn’t focus on anything other than the viral elephant in our global living room. This coronavirus, COVID-19, won’t let any of us ignore it. Constant news alerts about death, the reality of livelihood loss, and the… Read more »

Abigail K. Perry

Story Grid Scene Analysis: The Giver of Stars

Welcome back! In my last column I talked about the immense value of using Story Grid’s Scene Analysis Template to read with purpose, by learning how to read (and analyze a scene) like a writer.  To recap: the bulk of the Scene Analysis Template focuses on how a working scene creates a Story Event—or an… Read more »

Jason Jones

#5onFri: Five Tips for Getting Your Book on Local Media

You’re an author! Congratulations! Arriving here, book in hand, you’ve joined a very exclusive club. Writing is vulnerable, sacrificial and truth be told, a bucket-list item that most will never check off. An incredible amount of work goes into writing a book: the research, the writing, the editing and various publishing tasks. These can take… Read more »

D. P. Lyle

Do Series Characters Change?

Do series characters change? A better question might be: Should series characters change? Go through some upheaval that arcs their life into uncharted waters? But, first, what is a character arc? Where does it come from? How do you create this in your fictional stories? More importantly, do you even need one? What is a… Read more »