Writers Helping Writers^®

Posts by Marissa Graff

Five Ways to Get Your Protagonist to Realize They’re the Problem

April 8, 2025

Five Ways to Get Your Protagonist to Realize They’re the Problem

April 8, 2025

We’ve all heard the writing advice that we need to throw rocks at our protagonists. More obstacles, more tough choices, and more loss test them and force them to grow…

Backstory Balancing Act

January 21, 2025

Backstory Balancing Act

January 21, 2025

How to handle a character’s backstory is a universal struggle for all of us writers. How much should we include? How long should a flashback be? When is it okay…

Three Ways You’re Losing Your Reader’s Trust

October 15, 2024

Three Ways You’re Losing Your Reader’s Trust

October 15, 2024

There’s no better feeling than being in the hands of a great storyteller. They have command of the details we need to know, the scenes we need to see, and…

Three Easy Steps to Generate a Goal Using Fear as Motivation

April 16, 2024

Three Easy Steps to Generate a Goal Using Fear as Motivation

April 16, 2024

There’s so much emphasis on making sure that we give our character a goal that’s clear starting from their very first scene. Win the game. Find someone to marry. Land…

Write Like a Magician: Creating the Illusion of an Unseen Character

March 26, 2024

Write Like a Magician: Creating the Illusion of an Unseen Character

March 26, 2024

Whenever we write a protagonist who lost someone important within their backstory, we have some heavy lifting ahead of us. That “unseen” character—a character who has died or who is…

Turn Your Readers into Detectives

January 16, 2024

Turn Your Readers into Detectives

January 16, 2024

Imagine inviting us into your protagonist’s house or whatever you deem to be their most sacred physical space. But while we’re so excited to meet your protagonist, they’re not actually…

Three Ways to Make Readers Care About Secondary Characters

October 17, 2023

Three Ways to Make Readers Care About Secondary Characters

October 17, 2023

A common mistake I see in client manuscripts is a cast of secondary characters that simply exist to help or to outright block the protagonist. They’re either ready, willing, and…

5 Ways to Crash Your Character’s Pity Party

April 18, 2023

5 Ways to Crash Your Character’s Pity Party

April 18, 2023

We generally craft characters with the intention of making them someone the reader cares about. One of the primary ways to achieve that is to tap into reader empathy, and…

Four Reasons Your Action-Based Scene is Failing (And How to Avoid It)

February 23, 2023

Four Reasons Your Action-Based Scene is Failing (And How to Avoid It)

February 23, 2023

We’ve all heard the writing advice that our stories must hook readers from the start, and that pacing our scenes so readers stick around is equally important. It’s all too…

5 Ways to Approach Your Novel Like a Trial Lawyer

January 17, 2023

5 Ways to Approach Your Novel Like a Trial Lawyer

January 17, 2023

So much about good storytelling mirrors the way a lawyer might lay out the case for their client. Our job as writers is to select events and characters that reveal…