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Creative Writing Tip: Point of View and Character Description Go Hand in Hand
Welcome, fellow authors! Today, continuing my series on character description, I wanted to discuss point of view and how it affects the picture a reader receives of any given character. The idea to...
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The Flashback Scene: A Necessary Literary Evil?
Today’s topic is the flashback. We all kind of hate the structure involved flashbacks, we all strive to avoid them, and we all find that sometimes an author’s just gotta suck it up and write one, dang...
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Creativing Writing Tip: How to Utilize the Strengths of the Flashback Scene
Today, I’d like to continue our discussion about flashbacks. In particular: when you decide to use one, how can you minimize its disruptive nature? How can you best make it flow with the story and...
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Creative Writing and the Frame Narrative
Today I want to talk more about story structure: a vital component to all literature and one aspect where writers can be genuinely creative. Structure allows you to play with time…. It can make a...
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AUTHORS: 5 Ways to Share a Point of View That Contrasts With Your Protagonist’s
How important is it, when writing, to provide multiple points of view and multiple sides of the story? This is something all authors ask themselves, and it’s an important question without a clear cut...
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Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Two Kinds of Suspense All Authors Should...
Whatever genre you choose to write, suspense matters. Suspense will be a part of it. Of course, the best genre for suspense is the mystery/thriller genre, so today we’ll turn there to find two kinds of...
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One Key to Good Style: Consistency
This week, I want to talk about style when it comes to creative writing. Style is one of those things that are hard to define, yet we all know style when we see it developed. Plot and character aside,...
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The Evolution of An Author’s Voice: How Does It Happen?
Style is so important to writing. When you, as an author, find your voice: that’s a magical moment. And that’s what I want to talk about today: how do you know when you have found your voice? Does a...
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AUTHORS: Prepare For Negative Feedback From Your Non-Target Audience
At some point in our ongoing discussion about style and fiction, I knew I needed a post about reader response to style, because it’s such a tricky subject and so difficult to plan for. The most...
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Three Ways Authors Write in Excess (And How To Cut Back)
Today, I wanted to talk about four ways authors write in excess: that is, the techniques and words we all tend to exaggerate, overdo, and overuse, especially in first drafts. Let’s face it: if...
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5 Tips to Help Authors Find Their Voice
Today’s post is all about the process of finding your voice as an author: what IS that process? How does it work? Does it work the same for everyone? Well, I definitely don’t think the process unfolds...
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3 Kinds of Repetition You’ll Find in Fiction
I had been trying for days to find a topic related to creative writing for my next blog post. I was running dry, possibly because I haven’t written or edited my fiction in a while, and working on my...
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The Implied Author: What it is, and why it matters
Today, I’d love to start a discussion about a topic I only learned about/ really considered when I started grad school: the “implied author.” The term was coined by Wayne Booth in his book “The...
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AUTHORS: Is “Showing” versus “Telling” Truly Either-Or?
Today I am continuing a series of post about opposites in fiction that writers often consider to be cases of “either-or” but in reality may be seen to be the ends of a spectrum instead. By the very...
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Narration vs Dialogue: A Clear-Cut Distinction?
Narration versus dialogue in fiction: are they as diametrically opposed as they sometimes seem? In what ways do they overlap? I’ve been speaking lately about how our unique styles as authors and our...
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In Fiction: How Much “Down Time” is Too Much?
Downtime is necessary in fiction and in life. Your characters, models of actual people, will need it if they are to come across as human (or they must face the emotional and physical tolls we all...
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Should your first scene be about action or exposition? 4 considerations to...
I‘ve written before about first lines–whether they should be dialogue, and how much editing it takes to get a first line right– but today, I wanted to focus on the first scene. We have a lot of choices...
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Ask This Before You Make An Unlikeable Character Your Point of View Character
Authors, have you really considered the risk it is to choose an unlikeable character as the lens through which your readers view your story? Whether this character is a first person narrator or the...
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Why “Don Quixote” Teaches Us to Think Outside the Narration Box
Today I am continuing a two-part reflection on why authors (or anyone interested in the art of narration) should read “Don Quixote.” Yesterday’s post was about “Don Quixote” as the first modern novel...
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Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Literature
Truth. Beauty. Goodness. Who would turn those things down? I was watching a YouTube lecture recent by Dr. Peter Kreeft, who teaches philosophy at Boston College. And I thought he was dead on when he...
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