Effective Goal Setting for Writers
by Cat Rambo
Milestones are markers that show you’ve reached the end of one of these steps. Just as physical road markers tell you how far you’ve journeyed, these milestones help you mark progress.
Archive for the ‘The Craft of Writing’ Category
When Words Melt Away
by Hunter Liguore
Writing classes and books are filled with tips on creating characters and developing plot, but very few ever offer the golden jewel that oversees all the other components meshing together to arrive at a story or novel: coherence. In fact, when an author discovers coherence for the first time, they will experience a place where words melt away, and the only thing that remains is a deep knowing and trust in how the story will take shape.
The Reality of Writing in Uncertain Times
by Kali Wallace
By now everybody who spends any time on the internet has seen the quarantine memes. Isaac Newton invented calculus during a plague outbreak–what are you doing with your time? Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when stuck inside during bad weather–why haven’t you invented a literary genre yet? Look at how Giovanni Boccaccio used his pandemic–have you been as productive?
Persistence
by Bud Sparhawk
After being in the writing game for nearly thirty years and selling my output on a fairly steady basis I still find myself puzzled whenever another blank page stares at me. Ideas abound, but only a few may hold the power to become complete stories.
Making It Different – Pushing Genre Boundaries in Fantasy
by Martin Jenkins
One of the pleasures of genre is that it lets us identify a type of writing that we know we like. We’d feel short-changed if a crime novel didn’t feature a crime, after all, or if a romance didn’t put the travails of a relationship front and center. What we don’t want to see, however, is a mere repetition of genre tropes and clichés – it’s what is fresh and different in a work of fiction that keeps us turning the page while still being identifiably a genre work.
Epistolary Tales: The Narration of Documentation
by Ken Pelham
Occasionally, you come across a work of fiction told in the form of documents. Letters, court reports, diaries, news articles, and such. We call this epistolary narration (from the root word, epistle, meaning “letter”). Some call epistolary a gimmick. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m a sucker for it.
A Worldbuilding Guide to Crafting Diverse Cultures
by Amelia Wiens
One of the best parts of science fiction and fantasy is the worldbuilding. A key part of creating interesting worlds is creating diverse cultures that vary in some way from our own norms. That being said, it can be so hard to get out of our own culture’s point of view and redefine elements that we unconsciously take for granted.
Writing Down Fear
by Hunter Liguore
What do you fear when you sit down to write? Fear can be the debilitating emotion that prevents us from getting into the chair in the first place. It’s the force that makes lengthy excuses for why we can’t write. Next to procrastination, fear can cause us to abandon projects, call it quits, or worse, abandon the writing completely.
Filtering Feedback: Strategies for Overcoming the Revision Doldrums
by Ian Muneshwar
We’ve all been there. The dreaded-but-anticipated moment when your beta readers return your manuscript draft, and you sift through their comments in search of their praise, reactions, and criticisms.
Seven Ways to Grow Your Resilience as a Writer
by Alex Woolf
No one enjoys being rejected. Writers, who are often a touch more sensitive than the average bear, may feel the sting even more acutely. Which is unfortunate, as the daily work of the writer involves rejection on an almost continuous basis.
