Category Archives: Revision and Editing
What You Can Learn from Rhetorical Questions in Your Manuscript
It is such an easy thing to do. Once you become aware of author intrusion and what that looks like in limited third person, first person, or deep POV, the easy workaround becomes a rhetorical question. A rhetorical question is used to … Continue reading
Yesterday: Looking Back at the First Act
“Yesterday.” A beautiful, beautiful song that easily applies to our writing process. Confused? Go with me for a minute. It doesn’t matter if we’re a pantser, a plotter, a plotser, a puzzler, or some other mash-up of a writing process … Continue reading
How To Avoid A Half-Baked Idea
Half-baked ideas are everywhere in the spec pile. But what does ‘half-baked’ mean? After all, whether a script reader, agent’s assistant or intern LIKES the idea behind a story is another matter. Let’s look to the dictionary to agree on … Continue reading
Character Introductions: Making the Right Impression
Many aspects of writing can be hard to get right, especially in our first draft. For just two examples: With our story beginning, we might struggle to find a good balance between a throat-clearing boring scene (before getting to the … Continue reading
This Happened…and Then This Happened: The Dangers of Anecdotal Writing
Does your story suffer from anecdotal writing? It’s an important question, because that’s what happens when we write this way: our stories suffer. Michelle Barker is here to explain what anecdotal writing is, how to identify it, and ways to … Continue reading
3 Ways to Differentiate Your Characters
We’ve invited Resident Writing Coach Sacha Black to give us an extra dose of wisdom as she’s just released a new book that I think will help a lot of writers: Anatomy of Prose: 12 Steps to Sensational Sentences. This … Continue reading
How to Find Critique Partners & Beta Readers
Outside feedback is vital to the success of your manuscript. As I’ve quoted many times before on my YouTube channel, according to Terry Pratchett, “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” Our first drafts are imperfect translations … Continue reading
Tools to Make You a More Powerful Writer in 2020
The start of the year is when I pay close attention to what is happening in our industry: what publishers and organizations are focusing on, the changes occurring on sales platforms, and what author advocates are suggesting writers pay attention … Continue reading
Mastering Show, Don’t Tell
We hear it over and over: Show, don’t tell. You can’t get away from this advice, not in writing workshops, at conferences, or heck, even when visiting this blog. Writers Helping Writers and the thesaurus work we do is all … Continue reading
Improve Your Novel Writing: 11 Tips For Newbies
Writing a novel is flipping difficult. It often takes years to complete your first novel (and even more years after that to write a good one). You heard that right — writers’ first books are usually a hot mess. That … Continue reading