Happy National Grammar Day! We thought we’d celebrate by sifting through some common grammar mistakes in order to avoid them in future projects. A writer who possesses good grammar has a leg up when it’s time to edit.
Category: Writing Fundamentals
Primary Conflict: How to create the right conflict
Most stories in any genre are going to have a good amount of conflict. Actually, any novel I’ve ever read has several types of conflict, one following another, all tumbling like dominoes until the big finish. But your primary conflict is the most important.
Moms Who Write on Patreon: Resources, support, perks & more!
We’ve been planning for months and trying to figure out how to formalize some of the things we’ve been doing in our group for the past year. Our community is incredibly supportive, growing larger by the day. But we wanted to provide our members more. Enter: Moms Who Write on Patreon!
How to write captivating fictional characters
Writing fictional characters is my favorite thing. Yeah, sure, the plot and the world-building. But the characters! They make the story for me. Their realness and relatability can take a book to the next level.
Writing Blurbs (Part 3): Progression
Blurbing, dear friends, is the art of condensing. We’ve talked about what a blurb is and discussed its essential elements. We dove into how to streamline a blurb and build emotional momentum by limiting proper nouns and decluttering our details. What’s left is to discuss is writing blurbs that progress —how to take those minimal details…
Writing Blurbs (Part 2): Limiting Details
In the previous post of this series, I emphasized limiting details when writing blurbs. But why do that—and how? How does an author narrow down exactly what to mention, and what to exclude? Limit or eliminate place names The most obvious reason for this is to avoid visual clutter. Especially in fantasy or historical fiction,…
My experience with a pen name
In addition to using a pen name for different genres or to keep your fictional persona separate from your real-life, there are other reasons someone might choose to write under a nom de plume.
Writing Blurbs (Part 1): The Overview
The challenge of writing a blurb for your book is obvious. I mean, how do we tell the story without telling the whole story? That’s why it took us a whole book in the first place, amiright? I don’t think there’s any perfect formula. I suspect there are also some genre-specific tips out there for…
Get Your NaNoWriMo Project Back on Track
For the sake of this article, I’ll assume you’ve heard of NaNoWriMo, the mad dash to write a 50,000-word novel in November. If you haven’t, click here to check it out. If you have, and you’re participating this year, how are you doing? Are you on track? Have you fallen behind and lost hope of…
Favorite Writing Craft Podcasts and Videos
I’m not a writer by training. I completed my bachelor’s and master’s degrees to become a pediatric speech-language pathologist. Growing up, I wasn’t a fan of my English classes. While I loved reading, learning to diagram a sentence seemed ridiculous. Now that I want to become an author, I need some help developing my writing…