Write Gooder, not Better
1. His immortal pet raven inspired the famous Nevermore-speaker of Poe. Dickens had a pet raven named Grip. That alone might be interesting. Imagine growing up in a household with a nice, big, super...
It’s a pretty standard aspect of any skill. Before you go for a long run, you take a warm-up walk. Before you go on stage to belt out opera to a full stadium, you...
1. She lived within walking distance of Ralph Waldo Emerson… and had a lot of company. When Louisa was 8, she and her family moved into a house nearby Emerson’s cottage in Concord. Over...
There’s a lot to be said about dialogue. Perhaps a year, or ten from now, a revolutionary author will come along and present us with a book that has no spoken word, no vernacular...
(Thanks to AriaAdams for this week’s theme) Killing characters is a tricky business. Some people love it, some people (myself included) hate it. There are lots of different reasons for doing it. Maybe your...
One of the things that turns up in fiction (particularly sci-fi, fantasy, adventure and YA) again and again are heroes- and heroines, but for some reason the word “heroine” has much more Victorian connotations,...
Whether you’ve finished writing your novel, or have only just begun, one of the most important things to consider is character consistency vs character growth. Every character in your novel goes through a journey...
I know what you’re thinking- is she randomly jumping from one topic to another with no clear correlation between one and the next? Yes. Yes I am. Opening lines are something that really intrigue...
With 2013 being the 50th anniversary of Plath’s suicide, writers around the world have gathered to fondly remember the troubled poet. Yet the dark story she has to tell is not one to take...
Rock, Paper, Scissors As writers, sometimes we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. Whether this rock is a lack of inspiration, or a plot arc which refuses to be resolved, we...
