Characters can be fun to create. You want your heroes to be heroic and your villains to be villainous. Right? Of course. In the real world, though, no one is all good or all bad. Humans are a mixture of…
Characters can be fun to create. You want your heroes to be heroic and your villains to be villainous. Right? Of course. In the real world, though, no one is all good or all bad. Humans are a mixture of…
Look up the word Affectation in the dictionary. You will find it is “behavior, speech, or writing that is artificial and designed to impress.” In other words, it doesn’t sound a like a real person. That’s fine if you want…
It’s that time of the year again. It’s almost November and that means NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s a writing challenge that takes place every November. The challenge sounds simple. Write a fifty-thousand-word…
Last week, I talked about having a writing schedule. I gave some benefits to having one. This week, I’m going to talk about another benefit of having such a schedule is that it helps you to track your projects. It’s…
Writing schedules are a good idea when you have more than one work in progress. Having many pieces in progress is the norm for me. I have some that I’m planning, some that I’m writing and a lot that I…
Looping is a variation on free writing. You sit down and write for at least ten minutes. Write without thinking. Don’t edit as you go. Write as fast as you can. That’s all you do for free writing. Looping takes…
If you are like me, you keep a journal. Most writers do. I use mine for a lot of things. It records my thoughts. It lets me write drafts of stories, notes on various aspects of stories and characters. It’s…
Sometimes the story you want to tell is too big for a single book to cover. That’s when you need to create a series. To plan a series, you need to plan each book in advance. You can do this…
Deadlines are a scourge. That’s how most of us view them. They are necessary evils that keep us on track. That’s the better way to view them. I advocate setting a deadline for yourself. I do that and I find…